


Drift

by lilien passe (lilienpasse)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Developing Friendships, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Slow Burn, semi-au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 22:17:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 50,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11700975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilienpasse/pseuds/lilien%20passe
Summary: Garrison AU(-ish). Forever in the shadow of his family's prominent reputation at the Garrison, Shiro has worked hard to distinguish himself from their legacy. He and his friend Matt are close to securing places in the coveted "special projects" when new cadets are brought in, marked as fellow candidates for the spots. Among them is a new recruit named Keith. Initially wary of (and annoyed by) the other, Shiro and Keith find themselves inexplicably drawn together.





	1. Garrison

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't expecting to start another long fic any time soon but here we are. I worked hard to get this up before the S3 premiere and I cannot believe I (sort of) made it! I owe so much to my friends for encouraging me to actually write and post this, especially Getti, Bees, and Wuffen (who did some extra-quality beta-ing for me). Thank you all so much!  
> For status updates, check out my tumblr @lilienpasse  
> For way too much retweeted fanart and me crying about ships, follow me on Twitter @lilienpasse

“It’s going to knock out the power again.”

A roll of thunder made the glass vials on the table shake. The Bunsen burner flame jumped. Not enough to warrant Matt’s panicked gasp, though. Barely a flicker.

Shiro reached out to steady the vials, his eyes still trained on his textbook. The glass was so thin he could feel it resonating with the thunderclap. Vibrating against the pads of his fingers.

Another flash of lightning and Matt groaned.

“Fuck… Fuck, Shiro, they’re going to make us head out to the breakers again… why doesn’t maintenance stay through Friday evening? And why does the atmosphere wait until Friday to get all uncooperative?”

“Last shuttles into town leave Friday afternoon. And latent heat builds up—”

“For once can you forget for, like, five seconds that literalism is your religion.”

“I can’t turn my back on my people, Holt. Who would explain metaphors to them?”

Matt winced as another bolt of lightning lit up the sky. He gestured wildly towards the classroom windows.

“Look at this bullshit! There’s no way the shuttles are making it all the way back into town through this. They may as well have stayed.”

Shiro pressed his finger against the spot in his textbook so he wouldn’t lose his place and glanced out the classroom window. Sheets of rain made it hard to see more than a few feet out into the desert. 

It had taken getting used to. Rain in the desert. The sky held nothing back. Clouds blossomed against the endless robin’s egg backdrop, stretching from one end of the cracked earth to the other. As the day dragged on they clawed their way higher, higher. Turrets and towers and uneven explosions of shapes, spilling out upside down against the ceiling of the stratosphere. And when the rain came, it howled through the canyons to plaster itself against the classroom windows. Sky green, boiling from the latent heat of a star burning a hundred fifty million kilometers away. Lightning ripping its way through the chaotic mess in bursts of fantastic light.

The fluorescents flickered and roof tiles groaned under the pull of the wind. The entire Garrison classroom held its breath. Matt cursed softly. And creatively.

After a few seconds the lights stabilized. Captain Rendall seemed to take that as a cue to clap his hands and bark in his acrid voice, “That’s enough! If a little storm distracts you you’re no good to anyone!”

Shiro quickly tore his gaze away from the window and focused on his book again. Neat little calculations written in black ink in the margins. His mom’s old notes. Shiro was doing his best to ignore them. His own calculations were in red pen. A lot messier, a lot more crossed out and rewritten. 

He was trying not to read too much into that. His devotion to literalism was helping. Slightly.

Matt nudged him in the side (after glancing around to make sure Rendall was busy nit-picking another group’s work).

“New cadets coming in this weekend.”

“Yeah,” Shiro muttered, worrying at his lip as he stared at the last equation. Something was off…

“What, that’s it? Not even a little curious?”

“I’m more interested in passing this class, to be perfectly honest. Unless one of the new recruits ends up being a physical chemistry genius and wouldn’t mind brain-switching for a while.”

“Passing—Shiro, we could take this final in cryosleep and still get into the special projects track. We’re shoe-ins. Sock-ins. Those weird garter things men used to wear to keep their socks up at the turn of the twentieth. We’re a full knees-down ensemble in. Don’t worry about it.”

Another shock of thunder made the lights flicker. Shiro glanced up at the lights and then quirked a little grin at Matt.

“This is all just assuming we don’t get electrocuted fixing the breakers. Kind of a dangerous conclusion to jump to. Remember that fried mouse we found last time?”

“You’re something of an ass, Shiro. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Extra crispy. Nametag reading ‘Holt Junior,’ if memory serves?”

“Even if it were wearing a nametag we both know your eyesight’s not that good to read a mouse-sized nametag from your gargantuan height,” Matt hissed. “Secret contacts wearer. Yeah that’s right, I know about your true myopic nature.”

“Breaking out the thesaurus today, I see.”

“Bite me, Shirogane.”

Shiro raised an eyebrow and then pointed to a spot in his textbook.

“Check this line for me. Something’s not coming out right.”

“Huh? Oh—sure, hang on.”

Matt’s mood shifted immediately. He swiped the textbook out of Shiro’s hand, balancing it on his knee as he studied the equation. It took him all of two seconds to make that little ‘ah’ noise that Shiro had a painful love-hate relationship with.

“Simple carrying error. Here.”

Matt’s finger tapped against the offending area.

“Your mom got it right, though. I still don’t get why you don’t use her notes. I mean, I do get it, chip on your shoulder the size of Alaska but—”

“Big Island would be a more appropriate chip size, given my Pacifically-inclined origin story.” Shiro checked the math one last time and then began his final measurements. “Although I understand your need to scale up. Do you have everything ready on your end?”

“Been ready. Just waiting on you.”

“Good. Go ahead.”

Matt nodded and dumped his half of the experiment into the beaker. Shiro quickly poured in the reaction agent.

They stared at the glass, holding their breath.

“…Why’s it still purple.”

“I don’t know, Matt.”

“Did you fix the carrying error.”

“Yes, I fixed the carrying error.”

“Did you make any other errors? Perhaps of a non-carrying sort?”

“I didn’t.”

Shiro thought of the perfect black ink in his book. The scribbled red.

“I’m sure.”

Matt clicked his tongue in frustration and prodded the glass. Aggressively.

“Doesn’t make sense. Then why—”

The beaker suddenly began to shake and a moment later emitted a poofing cloud of orange dust. The liquid inside began to solidify, turning a reassuring pink.

Matt groaned and slumped against the table.

“Oh thank god.”

Shiro stared at the beaker. Uncomprehending and low-key dreading.

“The dust is a surprise.”

Matt waved his hand to clear the strange, orange powder off of his notebook and gave Shiro a grin.

“I may have skipped a few steps. Don’t worry about it.”

“Matt…”

“I said don’t worry about it! The end result is the same, we’re not being tested on the byproduct.”

Shiro stared at his lab partner, wanting to dredge up surprise, but honestly there was a reason no one wanted to risk being paired with Matt. And why he of the self-imposed “everyone fucking cooperate” camp (he may have lost his temper during a simulation, and Matt had chosen to remind him of his phrasing at every opportunity), had fallen on the academic sword at the beginning of the term.

Shiro rubbed some of the orange powder off of his nose. He stared at Matt, trying to keep a lid on his temper.

“…I may murder you,” he said finally. “Consider this warning a gift. Because of our friendship.”

Matt clicked his tongue and lightly patted Shiro’s arm.

“Shiro, Shiro, Shiro. Your threats are supposed to become more creative with time, not less.”

“The creative criminals are the ones that get caught. I’m simply honing my craft.” Shiro ran his fingers through his hair, his agitation growing. “Fun-and-games bantering aside, this was our final. I honestly don’t understand how you could be so cavalier with my—”

“Cadets? Are you ready for inspection?”

Shiro quickly hopped off his stool and saluted Captain Rendall. He could feel the blood draining from his face. Matt followed suit shortly after (giving more of a rakish nod than the proper salute, but Shiro wasn’t about to call him out in front of a senior officer). Rendall wasn’t exactly a tall man, but his blunt jaw, focused gaze, and broad shoulders gave him the aura of a rhinoceros that was biding its time before goring a hapless tourist. The slight bulge in his forehead didn’t help quash the similarity.

Captain Rendall picked up the beaker and dropped the test slip in without much ceremony. Shiro clasped his hands behind his back, staring at the little strip of paper that would determine his future.

The paper was still white.

His hands were growing clammy. Shiro fought the urge to wipe them on his uniform and held still.

Still white. Wonderful. Matt was right. He should’ve used his mother’s notes. Pride wasn’t worth failing. Whatever his mother had scribbled would probably have been enough to counter Matt’s ridiculous license to experiment. 

Shiro cast a sidelong glance at his lab partner. Who was staring at the beaker with a smug little smirk on his face.

Shiro clenched his fingers to keep his temper under wraps.

What he should have done, really, was not have paired up with Matt. Friendship wasn’t worth sacrificing—

The paper turned a light spring green.

Shiro let out a slow breath but forced his features to remain neutral. He could feel the rest of the class staring at them. Every pair of eyes was honed with something a far cry from admiration.

Rendall held the beaker up to the light, inspecting the testing strip for a painfully long moment before he set it back down. He returned to scribbling on his clipboard. It took every bit of self-control Shiro had not to crane his neck to see what the man was writing.

“Well?”

Matt’s impatient tone made the captain pause. Rendall glanced over his shoulder, his beady eyes narrowing.

“What was that, Cadet?”

“I said ‘well,’ sir,” Matt said, his back ramrod straight. “Implying that I hoped I would get a verbal answer from you about the status of our final.”

Rendall’s eyes flicked to the side to study Shiro for a long moment, his expression never changing.

“Your fellow cadet does not seem nearly as impatient,” he droned, focus moving back to the papers in front of him. “Perhaps he could instruct you later on the merits of keeping your mouth shut.”

Shiro’s cheeks colored. He could feel Matt fuming next to him, but all the other cadet said was a terse, “Yes, sir.”

Rendall turned and continued walking, pausing only to say, “You both pass.”

“Sir.”

Shiro snapped off another salute and then quickly began gathering his things, managing somehow to keep his elation (and shock) under wraps. The rest of the class was still staring at them, a few peeling off to talk in their small groups. Most were working in fours or fives. He and Matt were by themselves. First to go. First to pass. Maybe the only ones that would pass that day.

Shiro shoved his textbook and notepad into this bag and slung it over his shoulder. Matt was waiting for him, books in his arms and papers askew. He jerked his head towards the door, frizzy, uncombed hair bobbing with the motion.

“C’mon, we can hit the rec center for a bit before fitness specs.”

Shiro shook his head and pitched his voice a bit lower. Matt had no sense of propriety. Or proximity to senior officers.

“I’m not playing that pinball game again, just to warn you,” he said quietly.

“But—”

“Holt, Shirogane!” Rendall barked, cutting off Matt’s protest. “Maintenance shed needs you, ten minutes!”

Matt’s expression fell so quickly Shiro had to duck his head to hide his grin.

“Sir!”

“Sir…”

Shiro kept quiet as he followed Matt out into the hallway. Once they were alone (and out of Rendall’s earshot) he clapped the other boy on the shoulder.

“Breakers, Matt. Ready to roll the death dice? Maybe we’ll meet another Holt Junior.”

“Breakers…” Matt groaned and ran his hand down his face, dragging his eyelids down to reveal the pinks of his eyes. “If I die, struck by lightning in service of this god-forsaken academy, tell my sister she can dissect my WizKid9000.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Shiro said. “And if you die of lightning I have to assume I’ll already be dead.”

“How’s that.”

Shiro threw back his shoulders and grinned down at Matt.

“Considerably taller, so odds of me getting struck first are—well you’re the math genius, I’m sure you could work it out to a fairly impressive decimal.”

“Oh, sure, one growth spurt and you suddenly have your specs all memorized and are jumping to wild conclusions about lightning strikes,” Matt said sourly. “Fine. Gimme a bit to write up a last will and testament.”

Shiro stopped in front of his gear locker, quickly grabbing his rain coat and tugging on his boots. Overhead the lights flickered again. A distant popping noise made him move a bit faster.

“Matt! Double time!”

“That’s physically impossible!” Matt called out from further down the hall.

“It just means move faster!”

“I know what it means—you don’t have to have been raised in a Super Soldier household to know what fuckin’ ‘double time’ means!”

“Language, Holt!”

“Sorry, Captain Ludiet, Ma’am!”

Shiro shoved his flashlight into his belt and jogged down the hallway to Matt’s locker. The other boy was still struggling to buckle his rain gear. Shiro nudged him with the toe of his rubber boot.

“You have about forty seconds before we need to be walking. As fun as it would be to watch you hop down the hall I’d recommend gearing up to specs.”

“Glad to see that atomic clock you swallowed in infancy is still ticking away.” Matt grunted as he finished pulling on his boots. 

Shiro waited for Matt to stagger to his feet and started down the hallway.

“I think you’d like me more if I were slightly radioactive,” he said. “Fair warning, though, I would be regulating you to ‘wacky sidekick’ roll once my superhero show got started. It’s for your own protection.”

“Sidekick roll gladly accepted. And I wouldn’t necessarily like you more. As you are now I like you a reasonable amount. You’d get maybe a ten percent bump up.”

“Speaking of radioactivity, just how toxic was that orange dust byproduct?”

Matt’s footfalls stuttered. He recovered quickly.

“Gear shifting, Shiro, we’ve talked about this. Humans need adjustment time or we get conversation whiplash.”

“I said ‘speaking of.’ I thought that was a rather top-notch segue myself. And you’re dodging the question.”

Matt just cleared his throat, his cheeks lightly pinking.

Shiro gave him a deadpan stare.

“So toxicity levels… medium amount?”

Matt pressed his lips together and continued looking straight ahead. Shiro waited for a few moments and then prodded his shoulder.

“Medium amount?”

“Medium-light. Only if ingested.”

“All right.”

“Has to be ingested.”

“Did any get on that pen Captain Rendall is always chewing on?”

“On the pen that serves as the dictionary entry for ‘masticated’? That pen?”

“I believe that is the pen I have in mind, yes.”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible.”

“Yes.”

“Medium amount possible?”

“Medium-heavy.”

“That’s quite the spectrum, medium-heavy.”

“Maybe more on the heavy side.”

“How much more.”

“I made sure the saliva end of the tortured writing implement was liberally coated.”

Shiro pressed a hand against his face, torn between blind panic and panicked laughter. Panic was a rather strong component.

“Matt did you poison our professor.”

“He’ll just shit himself for a couple of hours. That’s my working theory, at least.”

“Before or after he informs the registrar that we’ve passed?”

“After!” Matt reassured him. “I’m pretty confident that it will be after.”

Shiro pushed open the doors to the pressure atrium, his stomach in knots again. The door closed behind them and they stood still on the weighing mats, waiting for the sensors to recognize them and open the outside doors.

Shiro felt a light tap on his arm. He glanced down to see Matt staring up at him, one eyebrow raised.

“You know I wouldn’t jeopardize your chances at special projects, right?”

Shiro looked ahead. What was done was done. It wouldn’t do either of them any good for him to chew Matt out. Or confess the doubts that they both knew he harbored quite close to the surface.  
After all they both knew what was at stake. The Garrison wasn’t exactly designed to make friends. Everyone knew cooperation was essential. The foundation of every squad. But they knew even better that reaching the level where you could espouse pithy lines like that required trampling over ninety percent of your cohort. Squad spots were few. Special projects ones, officer ones. Even fewer.

Matt let out a heavy, overwrought sigh.

“Cards on the table, Shirogane. We both know I’m not out to steal your spot. There’s two positions open. Last I counted we were two people. I know arithmetic gives you some trouble—carrying error and all—but I’m pretty sure that’s math that even Sullivan could do.”

“…I know,” Shiro said finally. And he did. On a conscious level, where he was just Takashi minus the cadet, he did know. He’d been friends with Matt since his first term, after all. Matt had skipped too many grades in elementary school. It made him small, it made him a target, and it made him work incredibly hard to prove himself. Nights spent hunched over his laptop, alone in the library, trying to push himself even beyond his last name, which was plastered to almost as many trophies and awards in the Garrison as “Shirogane.” 

They’d bonded over ambition and an unspoken, tacitly acknowledged fear of failure.

Shiro knew Matt was too indebted to entertain the idea of throwing him to the wolves. He’d had ample opportunity, too, and had never taken it. He needed Shiro’s reliability. His reputation in the Garrison as someone who could follow orders and stay focused. Even though there was the occasional carrying error. Usually manifested in temperamental outbursts that resulted in some mild property destruction.

A few months ago Shiro would have let himself fail rather than pass with someone else’s help. But the longer he stayed at the Garrison the more he saw holes in his own ability set. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was using Matt, but as Matt often reminded him, it was unlikely Matt would have made specs for special projects track without Shiro’s help. That eased the guilt slightly. Made their relationship more of an unsteady symbiosis.

Sometimes, though, the black ink in the textbook made it hard to keep Matt around. His mother, after all, had never had a partner to scribble corrections in her textbook. If there were only one seat for special projects, Shiro wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep from following Garrison protocol.

The cadet with the higher chance of base survival won.

Matt’s brain said base survival. Matt’s lungs, his frame. They didn’t.

The atrium’s red indicator light came on and the two of them held still while the pressure plates and other sensors recorded their information. Shiro could tell Matt was struggling not to fidget. The sensors always had a rough time with him. Incapable of staying still as he was.

The moment the light turned green, Shiro turned to face Matt, his expression serious.

“I don’t think you’re trying to steal my spot,” he said. And that part, at least, wasn’t a guilt-born, red-ink half-truth. “I just think you’re better suited for it. The best suited for it, to be perfectly honest.”

Matt raised an eyebrow and let out an undignified snort. But he had a small, pleased smile on his face as he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Cut it out. You know you’ll earn a medal of valor in a week for doing some comic-book level heroics. Meanwhile I’ll probably be murdered by my own men in the span of two days.” 

Shiro laughed and moved to open the outside doors, some of the tension leaving him.

“I promise I’ll show up at your funeral in my dress uniform,” he said. “Lend an air of legitimacy to the whole affair.”

“Make sure Sullivan isn’t invited,” Matt said. “No Sullivans of any type or disposition allowed.”

“Still on the warpath from the cheating incident?”

“You saw it! You saw it and it was blatant and you saw it. And I hate him.”

“Eloquence not your strong suit when you’re riled up, just to let you know. You should probably turn off your comm during the next simulation run.”

“Ludiet did threaten me with suspension if I ‘sully the young cadets’ ears’ again. Might just forgo a comm altogether.”

“Smart,” Shiro said. He looked out the windows and let out a little sigh. Rain had picked up. And all he really wanted to do was head back to his bunk and catch a nap before specs…

He glanced at Matt.

“Ready?”

The shorter boy nodded, looking grim.

“Let’s get this over with.”

Shiro shoved open the doors, ignoring the smarting in his shoulder. He had to brace himself to keep the airlock open. The wind had picked up. Rain lashed against his face and in a moment he was soaked to the bone. Useless rain gear. He waited for Matt to join him (the other boy stumbling almost immediately as his glasses were rendered useless) before heading towards the maintenance shed. The path was lit on either side with bright lights spaced apart every three meters or so. Visibility was often an issue. Flash storms, sandbursts, fog. For whatever reason the area around the Garrison was prone to bizarre weather patterns. Some of the local climatologists speculated there was an underground water source nearby they hadn’t managed to tap. There was too much moisture in the air for the desert environment.

Shiro held up an arm to shield his face from the rain. It pelted his skin, needle-like and stinging. The maintenance shed was about a hundred meters away from the main complex. Administration had isolated it as much as possible since the constant humming of the breakers tended to drive students up the walls during exams. Isolation, however, meant that the shed was more prone to lightning strikes and wind damage, despite the academy’s efforts to shore up the building’s infrastructure. Breakers went out almost every other storm, and with storms a bi-weekly occurrence during the winter months most cadets had spent a fair amount of time trudging out to the shed to make basic repairs. Teachers passed it off as part of their “training.” Military administration thought it was ridiculous that students preparing to be explorers, pilots, and fringe-theory scientists complained about a little rain.

Shiro felt Matt’s fingers dig into his coat as the smaller boy struggled to keep his footing in the gale. Shiro pressed his lips together and continued forward.

Twenty meters left.

“Shiro!”

Shiro reached behind him to blindly pat Matt’s arm in reassurance.

“Almost there!” he called out over the wind.

“No—stop patting me— look!”

Matt’s hand swung wildly into view. Shiro followed his gesturing, squinting into the rain. At first all he could see was the endless desert stretching off towards the distant cliffs, the path lights illuminating rivulets of water carving huge gashes into the terrain. 

Then he saw movement.

He pushed Matt further behind him, ignoring Matt’s swatting at his arm. He held up two fingers. Still.

Matt froze.

Shiro tried to focus on the figure but it was moving out of the narrow beams of light. Away from the maintenance shed, out into the desert.

He waited until the dark shape disappeared before venturing forward again. He could see the outline of the maintenance shed through the rain. 

Wordlessly he hurried towards it, frowning when he realized the door was slightly open, spilling yellow light out onto the well-worn path. Matt was tugging on his arm, and every so often above the wind Shiro could hear him protesting. Shiro tightened his grip around the other boy’s arm and bullied forward.

Five meters. The hum of the machinery worked its way up through his boots, making his bones shake.

Two.

Shiro yanked the door open and stormed inside.

None.

Shiro glanced around the small building, pushing his sopping fringe out of his eyes. The massive breakers were lined up along the walls, droning away. A few scorch marks on the walls indicated where one had recently failed. Shiro headed towards it, the constant vibrations from the breakers setting his teeth on edge.

“Shiro—Shiro for fuck’s sake, wait!”

Matt hurried after him, rubber boots skidding on the poured concrete floor.

“We need to get back quickly,” Shiro said. “Inspection and specs check is in twenty minutes.”

“Oh, right, inspection, I really feel the need to be poked and prodded for ten minutes after seeing a fucking werewolf out in the desert!”

Shiro stopped in front of the scorched breaker and waited for Matt to catch up. He raised an eyebrow at the other boy.

“A werewolf? That?”

“It had fucking yellow glowing eyes! Did you not notice?!”

“No. I really didn’t.” Shiro turned back to the breaker and did a quick visual check to make sure it wasn’t still live. No sparking, no telltale odor. He nodded his head towards the breaker.

“Voltage check? And make it quick.”

Matt stared at him, irritation and fear vying for prominence in his expression. Finally, though, he just rolled his eyes and grabbed the voltage reader out of his pack to do the test.

“Fine. Ignore my cryptozoology fears. But I’m telling you it had yellow eyes.”

“It looked human enough to me.” Shiro clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Why am I even calling it an it? It was clearly a person.”

“Right. Out in the middle of the desert. In the middle of a flash storm,” Matt deadpanned. “Very likely.”

“And you think the chances of it being a mutated protohuman… greater?” Shiro said slowly. 

Matt uncoupled the meter and gestured to the breaker, giving Shiro the all clear signal.

“Forget it,” he said. “Just do the inspection and quickfix so we can go. Nature and I were never meant to interact as closely as we just did. I need to be indoors.”

“You are indoors,” Shiro pointed out as he jimmied open the outer access panel with a wrench.

“This barely counts.”

“So is the entire Holt mansion hermetically sealed or just your quarters?”

“I’m more of the bubble-boy type of recluse, actually.”

Shiro opened his mouth to reply but then paused. He stared at the inner access panel. It had large scratches on the latch side and the door was slightly askew. Like someone had forced it open.

Shiro tugged on Matt’s sleeve, and at the terse, “What?” he wordlessly pointed at the scratches. He heard Matt inhale sharply.

“Okay I’m not saying those are werewolf claw marks, but what else would have scratched its way into an access panel like his?”

“Another cadet?” Shiro guessed. He pushed open the panel with the tip of a screwdriver. The wires inside were badly scorched—most likely the result of a lightning strike. But they had been hastily, and quite badly, patched with melder’s tape.

Shiro made a face.

“An incompetent one.”

Matt leaned forward to inspect the rig. He gagged.

“God. You’re right. Gotta be another cadet sent out here before us. No werewolf monstrosity worth its salt would do such a shit patch job.”

Shiro sighed and started stripping the deactivated tape away.

“It probably worked as a temporary fix. Temporary as in a few minutes,” he said. “We should get a record of who else is on duty so they can be retrained.”

“Maybe administration will appreciate us snitching so badly we’ll get taken off weekend repair roster for the foreseeable future,” Matt said. He visibly deflated. “Although I guess that does explain the not-werewolf. Whatever cadet was dumb enough to do this is probably dumb enough to ignore a clearly-lit path.”

Shiro hummed in agreement, too busy concentrating on patching the frayed wires to formulate a proper response. Tape reattached properly and prepped for fusing, he stepped aside to let Matt do his thing. A few seconds for the tape to do its work and the system was ready to restart.

“Fifteen second warning,” Matt said as he finished double checking the tape. He quickly hopped away from the breaker to give Shiro access. “Threetwoone go!”

Shiro didn’t waste time rolling his eyes like he wanted. He began reestablishing the breaker connection, his vision narrowing to a sharp, focused tunnel as he worked. Internal monologue counted out the steps. Slowed his fingers but avoided shocks. Switch codes, every one mentally intoned, repeated twice for accuracy.

Five seconds.

The number five, scrawled in black ink in the textbook.

Shiro started as the image overran the switch codes, breaking his concentration for a fraction of a second. He cursed as his fingers slipped and quickly pressed his knee to the grounding cable, managing somehow to avoid getting shocked.

Three seconds.

Red. Red then black. Red first then black.

Deft fingers quickly sealed off the last of the switches.

Shiro slammed the inner panel shut and quickly stepped away from the breaker. The machine let out a loud popping noise. The sharp crack of ozone filled the air and the breaker whirled to life, its steady droning adding to the din.

Shiro let out a slow breath of relief and took another step backwards.

No shocks. No black marks. No textbook.

He turned and smirked at Matt, holding up his un-singed fingers.

“Two seconds to spare. I believe that earns me the title?”

“…Not bad,” Matt said, sounding a shade disappointed. “Pity I didn’t get to see you get shocked again, though. Your weird bang things stand straight up. It’s quite the look.”

“Yeah, Karli was nice enough to point it out last time,” Shiro said dryly. “At least she didn’t tell Ames we were doing live repairs. That would have been fun to explain to the administration. Two special projects hopefuls too lazy to uncouple a few wires to avoid painful electric shock.”

“I can’t believe live repairs are off limits to cadets,” Matt said as he headed for the door. “The administration’s opinion of us is just. Staggeringly low.”

“True, but maybe next time don’t poison them in retaliation,” Shiro said. “I miss the days when you used to only terrorize people with electronics. Biochemical warfare seems beneath you.”

“A man has to evolve, Shiro, or he’ll fall behind,” Matt said gravely.

Shiro grinned and ruffled Matt’s hair

“Concerned about your height specs, Holt?” 

Matt batted Shiro’s hand away and headed for the door. “Amazed they could record your height at all with your head so far up your own asshole, Shirogane.”

“Flexible caliber. Special made. Let’s go, specs are in ten.”

Shiro lightly pushed Matt out the door. Matt wasted no time hurrying down the path towards the main compound. The rain quickly swallowed up his silhouette. Shiro locked up, grinding his teeth as the droning grew louder with the last breaker back online.

The moment the door was secure he took off, tearing his way across the barren expanse back towards the garrison. He outpaced Matt in a matter of seconds. Matt’s indignant yell coupled with the fading noise of the shed made him slow his steps enough that the other boy could have a fighting chance.

They raced back, Shiro winning (as he always did) but only by a few milliseconds. He took a moment to catch his breath before pushing the doors to the pressure atrium. 

“Close,” he said graciously.

“Bite me,” Matt wheezed.

Shiro stood patiently still and let Matt use his arm as a brace to keep from falling over as the sensors did their work. Shiro lightly patted his friend’s shoulder, the cold air of the atrium making him shiver.

“Maybe next time.”

“There better not be a next time,” Matt muttered, straightening up to stand under his own power. “By next semester I’m going to be in special projects. Soon it’ll just be me and the lab and no outside air ever and then it’ll be me and space and no outside air possible. I can’t wait.”

Shiro glanced up at the red lights dotting the ceiling of the atrium. A little smile tugged at his lips.

“Me neither.”

-x- 

It took the pressure atrium forever to clear them. Extra water threw off their weight scans, which meant they had to sprint towards the gym for specs, tugging off their sopping raingear as they went.

“I’m going to fail,” Matt gasped in between sucking lungfuls of air. “You’re going to have to just… throw me… for the long jump…”

“Only if they let me count that in lieu of a jerry can run,” Shiro said. He grabbed Matt’s stuff out of his arms, and when his friend squawked in protest he pointed out, “My locker’s closer.” Matt gave him a grateful thumbs up.

Shiro jogged the extra little bit down the hallway to shove their gear in his locker. But he paused when he noticed a few puddles on the shiny linoleum floor. Wet footprints. Sand outlining the treads. Trainers from the look of them. Not the typical boots officers wore.

From down the hall, Matt groaned. “Shiro, c’mon, you know I hate being the punctilious one but Deodhar said if I’m late again she’s gonna dock me a second on my sprints.”

“Yeah—okay,” Shiro said. He stared at the footprints and thought of Matt’s insistent claim. Yellow eyes.

He shut his gear locker and followed the footprints down the narrow service hallway. 

“Shiro! What are you doing?”

“Footprints,” Shiro called out over his shoulder.

“Foot—you can’t just bludgeon any question with a one-noun response.”

“Sorry. Wet footprints.”

Shiro heard Matt jog to catch up with him. A moment later the smaller boy lightly socked him in the arm. Shiro rubbed the offending area but pressed on.

“I thought I was being rather generous by supplying you with an adjective.”

“Why are we following wet footprints down this random hallway? Away from the gym?” Matt asked.

“Because I want to see which one of us is incompetent enough to try fixing a live breaker with nothing but crumpled melder’s tape,” Shiro explained. “Besides us, I mean.” He raised an eyebrow at Matt. “And because I bet you ten creds they don’t have yellow eyes. Or any lycanthropic characteristics for that matter.”

“Shiro, please. I’m a man of science,” Matt sniffed. “Gambling’s just—”

“Ten creds and one of those sandwiches from the co-op.”

Matt made a frustrated noise but finally nodded.

“I can’t believe you can buy me so easily with processed lunchmeats,” he muttered.

“We all have our price,” Shiro said. “At least yours is practical.”

They continued down the hallway in silence, although Shiro could hear Matt gnawing on the inside of his cheek. It made an alarmingly loud noise.

“We’ll make it in time for specs,” Shiro promised, turning a corner to follow the footprints. “You know I wouldn’t chance ruining my record.”

Matt pressed a finger against his lips and glared at Shiro.

“Quiet, man. Don’t you know anything about werewolf hunting.”

Shiro gave Matt a bizarre look.

“No,” he said slowly. “Should I?”

“Oh boy. Bet you were a barrel of fun as a kid.”

“I still am a kid. Legally speaking.”

“Yeah that sentence right there only lends credence to my hypothesis.”

Shiro opened his mouth to point out that Matt probably wasn’t in any better of a position, peer-friends-wise, but before he could they turned the corner into a proper hallway. Voices were coming from down the hall, around another corner that led to one of the lecture rooms. The wet footprints had almost disappeared, but a few damp spots led down the same hallway.

Shiro jogged down to the corner and flattened his back against the wall. He slowly inched to the edge and peered down the hall. All he could see was Captain Urma’s back. She was clearly berating someone (as if she spent her time doing anything else), but her massive frame blocked whoever it was from sight. 

“Shiro what the hell are you doing.”

Shiro spared Matt a glance but then turned his attention back to Urma and her hapless victim.

“Is this not how you werewolf hunt?”

“Shiro.”

“You’re the expert. Am I doing it wrong?”

“Shiro—”

“Shh, Matt. It probably has super hearing.”

With a little sigh Matt leaned up against the wall too. A moment later he was pressed against Shiro’s side, obviously straining to listen. Shiro peeked around the corner again. Urma had her hands on her hips. Not a good sign.

“—no idea why you thought it appropriate to abandon your squad on your first day,” she said in her booming voice. “This is the only warning you will get from us, Cadet. You will stay in line or you will be dismissed. There are fifty nine other recruits in there who would be only too happy to take your place. Do I make myself clear?”

“No. You don’t.”

The thin, sharp voice cracked like an abrasive punch against the silence of the hallway.

Shiro inhaled in alarm. Matt cursed softly.

“Holy fuck.”

“If he’s a werewolf he was probably expelled from his pack for being a liability incapable of sensing danger,” Shiro muttered, craning his neck to try and see who it was. 

“What was that, Cadet?”

Urma’s voice was low and dangerous. Shiro felt Matt shudder.

“Oh god. I’m getting flashbacks to level one stress tests. She’s going to make him run the gauntlet until he pukes.”

“She might just murder him. Cut out the middle man.” Shiro pointed as best he could to the visible, bulging vein on the back of Urma’s neck below her shortly-cropped brown hair. Matt blanched.

“The vein looks sentient. I’ve never seen it bulge that much.”

“Yeah, high chance we’re going to be called in as witnesses,” Shiro murmured, falling silent as the voice spoke up again.

“I said you’re not making yourself clear. No one could hear the lecturer, the projector kept going out. I was helping—”

“It is not your job to abandon your post and run out into the middle of a storm to play electrician during a mandatory meeting!” Urma snapped.

“Yeah he just needs to wait until he’s in the advanced course,” Matt muttered. “I’m with Werewolf, that’s bullshit.”

“He could have electrocuted himself and died,” Shiro said. “Bit of a blemish for the Garrison’s reputation, a cadet offing themselves on their first day. And the town’s already not fond of us.”

“Who cares about the town. I’m rooting for Werewolf.”

Shiro winced as Urma began to tear into the kid, her voice so loud it made his ears hurt. He and Matt exchanged glances and then wordlessly headed back down the hallway to duck behind a couple of display cases.

“We should go—we’re gonna miss specs and I don’t wanna be in Urma’s range when she goes nuclear,” Matt hissed.

“Unless you can Star Wars your body into hyperspace we wouldn’t outrun her supersonic anger anyway,” Shiro said quietly. “We may as well stay and see who wins the bet.” He winced again as a new barrage of threats rang down the hall. “…Assuming there’s even an eyeball left to inspect.”

They both fell quiet as Urma’s tirade subsided. There came a quiet, terse, “Yes, ma’am,” and then a snarled, “Back to your post, Cadet.”

A few thudding steps and a slamming door marked Urma’s departure. Shiro remained still, listening for any sign of life from the cadet.

The hallway was silent.

“…Did she actually kill him?” Matt whispered. “Or did—”

At the faint sound of footsteps Shiro quickly clamped his hand over Matt’s mouth. Matt licked his palm a few times in childish retaliation but Shiro didn’t budge. 

The footsteps turned the corner and finally the Werewolf came into view. Reflected through the glass of the display case, his figure was distorted. On the tall side. Thin side. Mop of dark hair that was rather wild and unkempt, so much so that for a deluded moment Shiro wondered if there was any credence to Matt’s werewolf speculation.

Shiro kept perfectly still, listening. He saw the cadet reach up and scrub at his face, the glass warping his expression too much to read. Shiro held his breath as the figure passed in front of them, but some small noise must have caught his attention. He stopped, momentarily startled, and turned to stare down at them.

Shiro remained on the ground, too embarrassed at being caught sneaking around (and to be so bad at sneaking around as to be caught in the first place) to do much other than blink. The cadet was on the tall side, but his frame was fuller than it had first appeared. Broad shoulders, long neck, pointed chin and nose. And dark, dark almond eyes. Eyes that narrowed instantly as they regarded them, surprise quickly bleeding away until an almost haughty expression was all that remained.

“What are you doing.”

Matt shoved Shiro’s hand away and scrambled to his feet. Shiro quickly followed suit, feeling off-kilter and oddly… hunted. The cadet’s stare slid from Matt to fix on him. Shiro could only stare back, something in the other boy’s gaze making his stomach churn.

Matt’s elbow against his ribs jarred him out of it enough to speak.

“We heard voices,” Shiro said lamely. “And we didn’t want to interrupt, or—uh…”

The cadet furrowed his thick brows. His head tilted slightly to the side.

“How much did you hear.”

“Uh… what?” said Matt.

“When did you start eavesdropping.”

“Rephrasing the question doesn’t really—”

“When Urma started chewing you out for leaving initiation,” Shiro interrupted. “Nothing before that. Can we go?”

The boy blinked and took a little step back.

“…Yeah?” he said slowly. “Are you asking for my permission or what.”

“What?” Matt said. “No, just—checking for some… reason.”

The boy didn’t say anything. His dark eyes swept across both of them, his gaze blatantly lingering on the insignias on their shirts before he looked off to the side.

“So you’re cadets too,” he said. Without another word, he turned and walked away.

Shiro kept an eye on the cadet. It wasn’t until he turned a corner and disappeared from view that Shiro let out a slow breath and his shoulders relaxed.

“Weird kid,” Matt commented, adjusting his glasses. “I’d almost prefer lycanthropy traits next to whatever the hell that was.”

Shiro started jogging back towards the gym, his stomach still in knots.

“I don’t like him.”

“Oho?” Matt jogged next to him, a shit-eating grin on his face. “The affable unflappable Shirogane finally revealing his true colors?”

“I vocally dislike lots of people,” Shiro muttered. “Including him.”

“Harsh. Those ten words he said must’ve really gotten to you.”

“It wasn’t what he said.”

“Poor posture? He was kind of slouchy.”

“It wasn’t anything physical.”

“Nothing he said, nothing physical…” Matt ticked off on his fingers. “So I suppose that just leaves his spectral aura. You get a bad reading off of him, Miss Cleo?”

Shiro thought of the dark eyes. The haughty expression. He felt his hackles rise and his cadence picked up.

“Something like that.”

Matt’s footsteps stuttered and Shiro could practically hear the gears in his head turning.

“Is he dangerous?”

The teasing was gone from Matt’s voice. Replaced by gleeful curiosity.

“Dunno,” Shiro said tersely. “But gut feelings—”

“Rarely lie, yeah. We attended the same paranoia seminar.”

Shiro came to a stop outside of the gym. The rest of their class was inside getting warmed up before the weekly physical inspection started. He glanced down at Matt.

“Later?”

Matt nodded and adjusted his glasses, a grim look on his face.

“Later,” he agreed, “Assuming I survive this.”

Shiro clapped him on the back and then pushed open the gym doors.

“One more quarter of physical specs. You’ve lasted this long without your kneecaps shattering. Ironically shattering everyone’s expectations in the process.”

“If the space pilot thing doesn’t work out you should add pep coach to your potential career trajectories.”

Shiro flashed Matt a quick grin and then jogged over to the warm up area. He went through his paces, trying to shake off the lingering feeling of discomfort. Of dark eyes staring down at him.

Not yellow eyes, though, so at least there was that. Ten creds was worth feeling oddly hunted by some random newbie cadet.

Specs started only a few seconds after they arrived. They were broken up into the usual groups to go through the rotation. Strength, flexibility, agility, reaction time, focus. Each spec test was the same every time. Made it easy to chart progress, but Shiro privately thought that repetition might not be the best training device for pilots and crew who needed to learn strategies for multiple contingencies. Special projects might be different. Their training was classified.

Repetition did make it easier, though. His body knew what to do and his mind could forget everything else, forget who he was and focus on the simple tasks. The same muscles moving. Same pattern of tendons, ligaments, nerves firing. Formal and systematic. 

“Time!”

Shiro released his grip on the rope and slid down the four meters to the padded mats below. He shook out his wrists, methodically going through his stretches. His supervisor Keela had a smug grin on her face as she gestured towards him with her clipboard.

“You keep this up, you’ll beat the S record yet, Shirogane. Sure we can’t lure you away from special projects? We’d love to have you in tactics.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sure,” Shiro said. “I’d be fine if I never had to climb a rope or beat up a boxing dummy again after this year.”

Keela sighed dramatically and held out her clipboard.

“Shame. Here’s your report, submit it to Stevens as usual. You have anything planned for this weekend?”

“Just the library, ma’am,” Shiro said as he quickly signed his name to the report before handing it back to Keela. “My last project exams are on Monday.”

“Ah… right.”

A loud yell made her and Shiro look over to the other side of the gym. Matt’s group was doing the strength test. Rough when it ended up being the last in your rotation. Matt was on the bench, the bar he was supposed to be lifting inching closer and closer to his chest.

“Twenty seconds remaining, Holt!”

The bar was getting lower.

Shiro took a step forward, holding his breath. Even from across the gym he could see Matt struggling. His spotter (some girl from another track Shiro didn’t recognize) was gnawing on her lip, her eyes flicking back and forth from the bar to the instructor, waiting to receive permission to help. But the instructor’s jaw was set. With her dark hair pulled back into a severe bun the figure she cut was the textbook definition of immovable. She crossed her arms over her chest and barked, “Seventeen seconds!”

Shiro heard Keela let out a little sigh next to him.

“Poor Holt. Stuck with Deodhar again.”

“Ma’am, should I step in?” Shiro asked. “It doesn’t seem likely that he’ll—”

“Negative. Deodhar’s a hardass but it’s her test to run. Trust your instructors. I’m going to finish up your form, here. I think we can bump you up a level or two for next specs.”

Shiro forced himself to stop moving. He gave a curt nod and muttered, “Ma’am,” with a bit more irritation than he normally would have let on, which made Keela say an absent, “Tone, Shirogane,” before turning her attention back to her clipboard. 

“Ten seconds! You need one rep, Holt, push through!”

Matt was still straining at the bar, his face bright red and his knuckles white.

His arm suddenly buckled. He inhaled sharply, heel scraping against the floor.

Shiro’s heart leapt in his throat and without thinking he started forward. Before he could take a step, before Matt’s spotter could do much more than let out a startled noise, Deodhar had wrapped her massive hand around the bar and pulled it up. She set it easily in its rest. The sound of metal on metal rang through the small gym.

Matt was still lying on the bench. His arm was thrown over his eyes.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to mark this test as insufficient.”

Matt didn’t move.

“This is your third attempt. You have two more.”

Deodhar whipped out her clipboard and began scribbling on the glass surface.

“You understand that we’ve lowered the bar for you as much as possible, Holt. Ironic pun intended. This is the minimum special projects will allow. Anything else would put you and your fellow trainees at risk.”

Matt’s spotter had knelt down and was silently hovering over him, a pinched look on her face. Shiro could hear her hissing Matt’s name from across the gym. Worried. Shiro glanced at his instructor. Felt the clear lines on the gym floor marking where each group was supposed to be. Keela’s ‘negative’ was wrapped around his leg like a constrictor. 

So instead of running over and telling the girl that Matt didn’t need whispering to or coddling or anything other than a silent hand up, he forced himself to remain in ease posture and clasped his hands in front of himself so Keela wouldn’t see them trembling.

Matt suddenly bolted upright. He stood, wavering on his feet for a moment before he straightened up and stared Deodhar in the face. He threw his shoulders back.

“Ma’am, I believe the board of directors has asked you several times to make an exception for me. And I shouldn’t need to remind you just who—”

“We are making an exception, Cadet.”

Deodhar had lowered the clipboard and was staring at Matt with disgust in her eyes. “Your family name can’t take the test for you anymore than any other legacy cadet’s can. Learn from their example and train if there’s something you want.”

She yanked Matt’s chip out of the clipboard and held it out towards him.

“Try playing that card again and I’ll see to it that every shortcut you’ve taken will be closed off to you from here on out. Dismissed.”

Matt stared at the card as though it were a venomous snake. The gym fell silent, every pair of eyes trained on the scene. Matt’s posture slowly crumbled until finally he reached out to grab his card from Deodhar’s grasp. His gaze was on the floor as he said a terse, “Ma’am.”

He turned on his heel and headed for the exit. Shiro cast his supervisor a quick glance and she nodded, holding out his own card.

“Dismissed, Shirogane. Go make sure golden boy doesn’t sue the place.”

Shiro grabbed his card and gave Keela a perfunctory nod before jogging out of the gym.

He caught up quickly with Matt. The other boy hadn’t made it far. He was leaning against a set of lockers, his back to Shiro as he stared at the chip in his hand.

Shiro slowed his steps as he approached and hung back, unsure how to proceed. 

He cleared his throat.

“You were close. That bodes well.”

Matt didn’t respond.

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck and tried again.

“We can focus more on building upper body strength this weekend instead of cramming for Izaak’s test, if you want. I don’t think—”

Matt pushed himself up and looked over his shoulder at Shiro.

“I haven’t been able to pass in fourteen attempts. Two more isn’t going to make a difference and Deodhar knows it. She’s just a fucking psychopath with a chip on her shoulder because she went through the Garrison on a scholarship or some other bullshit.”

Shiro frowned, something in Matt’s tone making his skin prickle.

“She was kind of harsh, I guess,” he said.

“Kind of harsh.”

“She’s letting you take it again. The rules for special projects—”

“I don’t need you to quote the rules at me, ‘legacy cadet.’ I know the fucking rules.”

“Then you know that Deodhar’s being fair—”

“Why doesn’t she throw your family name back in your face, huh? Is it because you’ve trained your robot body to execute a perfect, Garrison-approved pushup on command? Talk about an unfair advantage.”

Shiro felt his temper start to fray. He took a little step forward.

“I worked hard to pass specs too, you know. I don’t exactly enjoy them—”

“Oh bull-fucking-shit you’ve coasted through as much stuff as I have by waving around your mom’s name. Deodhar just gives you a pass because—”

“Shut up about my mom!”

Shiro immediately pressed his lips together after his outburst and took a step back. His voice pinged down the halls. Several other cadets ducked their heads and hurried their steps, skirting both of them a wide berth.

Matt didn’t look impressed. He waited a few moments, presumably for the noise to die down, before he said bluntly, “You’re an idiot to not use every advantage you have. You and I both know it’s the logical thing to do. We’re the best here, we do the best work—I’m not bragging, it’s empirically true. And the only reason we’re not being ushered into special projects right now is because the Garrison is terrified of looking like it’s playing favorites. I don’t get why you won’t even consider trying to get them back.”

Shiro tightened his grip around the chip in his hand. The sharp corners dug into his palm. He wanted to lash out again, tell Matt he could work on his own, then, if he was so empirically sure of everything.

Shiro shoved his chip in his pocket and stormed past Matt.

“If you really knew the rules you’d play by them,” he said, “I’ll see you at dinner.”

He heard Matt sigh but a moment later the other boy said, “Don’t torment yourself into a permanent funk, Shirogane. This is supposed to be my angst trip. And you’ll spoil your appetite.”

Shiro just waved over his shoulder to show that he’d heard as he continued on towards his dorm. Lightning was still streaking across the sky, killing any possibility of going for a run. A shower and a nap would have to serve as his cool down.

His roommate was thankfully gone when he reached his dorm room. Shiro grabbed his towel and caddy and immediately headed for the baths. Only one other shower stall was being used. Shiro took the one on the opposite end of the long row. He turned on the water full blast and then began peeling off his sweat-drenched clothes. He’d been at the Garrison long enough to know that you had to wait a good two minutes before the water even started to approach lukewarm. Most cadets grew impatient and hopped in too early. During peak hours the hallways around the baths echoed with the loud cursing of those unlucky enough to grab an especially slow-heating shower.

Shiro waited as long as he could before impatience took over. He stepped under the spray, biting back a little grunt of discomfort as the cold water hit his back. His body adjusted after a few brutal seconds. He rested his forehead against the tile wall, some of the tension finally leaving him.

His temper was going to be even more of a problem from here on out. No one needed a special projects member who flew off the handle the moment their parents were so much as mentioned in passing. 

Shiro squeezed his eyes shut and hit his hand against the wall.

Focus.

He hit his hand harder. Pain shot up his arm.

Focus.

Hit again.

Find the center. Hold it there. Struggling, bargaining, didn’t matter. Hold it with force.

Focus.

Shiro opened his eyes and stood up straight. He looked down at his hand. Red, along the wrist especially. Would probably bruise tomorrow.

Shiro ran his hand over his eyes and slowly tilted back until he was out of the spray. He stared up at the bath ceiling. His eyes stung.

He was tired. Enough to notice, even, which was rare. He was pushing himself too hard in specs. He’d asked the instructors on his first day to not tell him what his mom’s records were (if they even knew—he suspected they were recorded somewhere), but his masochistic brain constantly imagined they were always one millisecond faster. One millimeter higher.

At least he wasn’t on the officer track. A small difference he would secretly hold close to his chest as a point of pride and relief.

He pushed himself up and grabbed his shampoo. Fell into simple routine.

Seven minutes later Shiro stepped out of the shower, carefully balancing his soaking wet gym clothes (that he’d spaced and left on the floor in the one spot guaranteed to not be covered by the flimsy curtain) and the rest of his things while keeping one hand on the towel around his waist. He headed for the door. As he passed the other shower its inhabitant yanked the curtain open. The sudden movement startled him enough that the balance he’d been struggling to maintain collapsed like a house of cards. His wet clothes landed with an undignified splat on the scuffed tile floor, followed shortly after by the equally humiliating “tonk tonk tonk” noise of every bottle of hair care and hygiene maintenance product he owned tumbling out of his arms and hitting the floor like so many misguided lemmings.

Shiro cursed and quickly bent down to retrieve his things. The other person simply stood there, which Shiro was half-grateful for (in the hopes that he’d be left alone to scrape up his dignity) and half-irritated by. From above him he heard a little “ah” noise. He glanced up, his sopping wet clothes and now-cracked bottles of shampoo cradled in his arms.

The not-werewolf was staring down at him, looking silently unsure. He didn’t wear the expression well. His brows were furrowed more than a reasonable human’s had the flexibility to achieve, and his mouth was twisted into something close to a grimace.

“Did you forget to close the curtain or something?”

Shiro pushed himself to his feet, his stomach clenching unpleasantly as the other boy continued to stare at him. The cadet didn’t blink enough. Maybe that was what was throwing him.

“What?”

The boy tilted his chin, gesturing towards the wet clothes in Shiro’s arms.

“They slide.” The boy mimicked the gesture. “The curtains, I mean. Not your clothes. Considering their, uh. Dampness. Level. They probably wouldn’t slide.”

Shiro took a little step backwards, not immediately sure how to respond. “I left them on the floor by accident,” he said slowly. “What are you doing here? This is the special projects track’s dorm. Aren’t you a first year cadet?”

The boy’s eyebrows furrowed more. The bit of pleasantness that had been in his expression vanished.

“How do you know I’m a first year? Or—oh. Oh.”

The boy’s expression relaxed a bit. He nodded.

“From the hallway.”

“…What?”

“You know me from the hallway,” the boy repeated. “You were hiding by the trophy case with that other kid with glasses and frizzy hair.”

“Matt,” Shiro found himself supplying. He made an irritated noise and took another step backwards. He didn’t know how to handle this person. Best to leave.

“First year dorm is on the other end of the compound,” he said as he turned to go. “Someone can show you if you get lost.”

“Okay. Do I need to go there for something?”

The confused answer made Shiro pause. He turned to face the other boy again.

“You should’ve been shown your room during orientation.”

The boy nodded and pushed his wet hair out of his eyes.

“Yeah, I was.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

The boy frowned again and tilted his head to the side.

“I live here?” he said, sounding halfway unsure. “I mean my name’s on the door down the hall, and this is where they told me to go, so.”

Shiro let out an impatient breath.

Focus. No use blowing up at some confused cadet while they were both wearing nothing but towels in the middle of the baths.

Easy way to sort this out.

“What’s your name.”

The boy narrowed his eyes. For a long moment Shiro thought he might not say, that he’d called his bluff. But then the boy met his gaze. Wary and challenging. Shiro felt like he was trying to stare down a shark through a thin metal cage. He had the advantage. But it was slight and temporary, and both of them knew it.

The boy lifted his chin. Threw his shoulders back, very slightly, as he wordlessly sized Shiro up.

Shiro heard the metal of the cage start to fail.

“…It’s Keith.”

Shiro turned and headed out the door, unnerved by the boy’s stare, which was only serving to make him more irritated. There were no “Keiths” in the special projects track. It was a small program. 

He walked down the hall, eyes scanning the nameplates next to each dorm room. He passed his own. Two down from him, across the hall, there it was. Two person room. Alex Seizer. Keith Kogane.

Shiro stared at the two names. He recognized neither. There wasn’t a “Alex” in the special projects track as far as he knew. And there were no first years named Keith. Or there shouldn’t have been. But here was a nameplate with indisputable proof. 

Two spots in special projects were opening this year.

Two new names on a door.

Matt was right. He shouldn’t have been trying to play fair.

Shiro turned on his heel, ready to track down Matt so he could tell him and they could both explode together about how ridiculous it was, but the boy—Keith, Shiro thought in a flash of irritation—had followed him down the hall. Shiro nearly ran into him and let out an embarrassingly loud gasp of surprise. Keith started back a few paces as well, which was something, at least, although he quickly found his footing and stared up quizzically at Shiro.

“Uh… is my name really gasp worthy?”

“What—no, you snuck up on me!”

Keith blinked, his mouth twisting down into the same confused grimace as before.

“I was just walking down the hall to my room, though? Which doesn’t… super say sneaking to me but okay. Sorry, I guess.”

Shiro pressed a hand against his face, counting to five before he lost his cool and yell at this… first year of a person. Again.

He lowered his hand.

“What track are you on.”

Keith shrugged his shoulders. His collar bone jutted out too much. He looked thin without his cadet’s uniform on.

“Not sure. They asked me which one I wanted and gave me a list to pick from. I told them whichever one would let me graduate from simulator work fastest. But I haven’t received my official assignment yet since I’ve been here all of seven hours.” Keith raised a thick eyebrow and gestured to the door. “Are you done reading my name plate? I need to get inside.”

Shiro wordlessly stepped aside. Keith passed by him with an absent, “Thanks.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

Shiro hated himself for turning around and glaring at the door. He barely resisted flicking the door off, and it took every ounce of willpower he possessed not to storm back to his room. Like he was some bratty five-year-old instead of one of the top trainees in an elite military academy. 

He jogged to his room and threw on a clean pair of rec clothes before heading to the staff offices. Ames was behind the receptionist desk as always, his mop of curls bouncing cheerfully along with the on-hold music blaring from the handset on his desk. He waved at Shiro and gave him a huge grin.

“Hey, Shirogane! Heard you set another specs record last week! Congratulations!”

“What? Oh—yes, by two-one-hundredths of a second so it’s probably timer error more than anything,” Shiro said, his laser-focus momentarily diverted by the undeserved compliment for something so insignificant. He stopped in front of the desk and let Ames chat at him for a bit. The guy was lonely. Pictures of his family decorated his little cubicle. They lived a few states away. He visited them every other weekend. Saving up for a house closer to base, but the market was terrible.

Shiro knew all of this, down to last detail, because being lonely, Ames liked to chat. And during his first year when he’d been equally lonely, Shiro had been only too happy to listen. He’d since learned that Ames could rant for a good half-hour unless he was politely diverted. Shiro waited for a slight opening in the conversation and then made his move.

“Mr. Ames, do you mind if I ask a quick question about housing?”

Ames paused mid-breath and immediately nodded.

“Fire away! You hoping to move up? Maybe get a single room like the officer track students?” He laughed. Too loudly for Shiro’s taste, but whatever. “Breaking a spec record’s not enough to get you an upgrade, I’m afraid!”

Shiro waited for the guffawing to subside before saying, “No, I’m happy where I am, thank you. I was wondering if all of the first year dorms are full?”

Ames raised an eyebrow.

“Oh? Looking to downgrade instead? It’s not unheard of, but, uh, if I were you I’d think twice. First years living away from home, usually for the first time? Waterworks city. I get terrified intercoms all night when I’m working the late shift. Usually kids with homesickness. Or older students who are fed up with said kids and—”

“No, not looking to move there myself,” Shiro said as patiently as he could, “I mean are they full now? There’s a couple new students on the special projects track floor and—”

“Seizer and Kogane, right?” Ames nodded. His curls bounced. “Yeah, no, they’re supposed to be there, no worries! Sweet of you to look out for them, though. They settling in okay?”

“Yes—no, I mean—what are they doing there?” Shiro could feel himself growing flustered. Thankfully Ames didn’t seem to notice and continued babbling in his happy, absent way.

“Special projects track right out of exams! Well, before exams, even. They’re part of the new recruitment project. Full scholarships, advanced courses, all that stuff. I told the director that was a one-way-ticket to unpopularity, shoving some poor new kids up there with the vets but you know how she is. Steely demeanor and lots of really big words about promise and dedication and exploration and pushing the boundaries of humanity. You’ve heard the spiel.”

“So are they in special projects or just the prep track like we are?” Shiro pressed, his voice cracking a bit. Ames finally seemed to notice. His curls stopped bouncing.

“Ah… no, they’re on the track like you guys,” he said, his voice taking on a more serious tone. “No worries. We don’t let people into Projects without some serious vetting. They still have to prove themselves—just got a slight leg up is all.” He leaned across his desk, his brows furrowing with concern.

“You’re a shoe-in, Shirogane. The Garrison’s not going to steal your hard-earned spot with a couple of cocky freshmen. They have to earn it, same as anyone. Same as you.”

He reached out and tousled Shiro’s hair in that big-brotherly way of his that was reserved for terrified first years. And Shiro, apparently. Shiro bore the contact stoically, his heart still beating too fast for him to really register the gesture.

Ames sat back in his chair with a giant woosh of air and gave Shiro a thumbs up.

“Hang in there, kid. The staff and I are all rooting for you. It’ll be great to have another Shirogane’s name on the wall!”

“Oh… yeah. I mean, yes. Thank you, sir,” Shiro said quietly. He nodded towards Ames (who promised that next time there was a birthday in the staff office they’d save a piece of cake for him and Matt) before leaving the office.

He waited until he was out of sight to duck down a deserted hallway. He leaned against the wall, his temper still trying to get the best of him.

He lightly hit his head against the wall, the jolt enough to start to calm him down.

Focus.

All it meant was that they had two more people to compete against. Didn’t count for much. Special projects was the most popular track. The most flunked-out of, too. He and Matt were the top of their class, provided Matt could get his specs straightened out.

And if not, then.

Maybe it would only be him.

Shiro slowly sank to the floor and rested his forehead against his knees. He felt sick to his stomach thinking it, but that was the nature of the job. Liabilities couldn’t be tolerated, for the good of the team. It was like lifeguarding. Some swimmers would pull the guards down with them.

Shiro let out a slow breath and carefully stretched out his legs in front of him. 

Right.

…Right.

He pushed himself to his feet and headed back towards the dorms. The bell chimed again, signaling rec hour before dinner. Matt would be in his room. Hopefully he’d be calm enough to discuss strategies against the new complication. They had to move fast. Before the complication graduated to a problem.

Shiro quickened his pace, ignoring the students who got out of his way as he moved down the hall.

Matt’s room was on the floor above his. His roommate was a quiet, burly guy who spent most of his time in zero-g simulation. His weakness. Matt complained about the retching noises the guy made whenever he was in his bunk recovering from a session but Shiro thought it was a small price to pay for a mostly-absent roommate. His own was almost always in the room studying. Didn’t like the library. And really didn’t like Shiro trying to bond with him. They had a terse relationship, which meant that Shiro spent more of his time with Matt than in his own room.

He knocked on the door and then waited, fiddling with the thumbprint lock when Matt didn’t immediately answer. It took nearly half a minute before the handle turned and the door cracked open very slightly. Matt peered up at Shiro, wet hair hanging almost in his eyes.

“…You’re not here to drag me off to upper-arm strength training. Are you,” he asked warily. “Because I’m already in my rec clothes and if I have to put gym shorts on again I might combust.”

Shiro shook his head.

“We have a problem.”

Matt’s eyes widened slightly. He opened the door a bit more.

“I… I mean I know I said some kind of heated stuff, but you agreed when you became friends with me to let me throw the occasional tantrum and I’d afford you the same courtesy—”

“No, not between us,” Shiro said impatiently. “We, the two of us, have a collective problem. Alex and Keith.”

“…I would guess that you’re naming celebrities of some sort, except I have a feeling that if you so much as looked at a gossip magazine your eyes would spontaneously self-immolate.”

“Yes that is why my grandmother had to cancel my cousin’s subscription to Teen People,” Shiro said dryly. “Cadets, Holt. New cadets.”

Matt pursed his lips but then wordlessly opened the door.

“Garvey should be out until late. Poor pukey bastard.”

Shiro took his normal seat on the floor in front of the little table in the middle of the room. Matt joined him a moment later, tossing him a soda.

“Here. Care package from home arrived.”

Shiro caught the soda but didn’t open it. He tugged at the label with a blunted fingernail.

“From your sister?”

“Yeah.” Matt cracked his bottle open and took a sip. “Drives mom nuts ‘cause it costs a fortune to ship. But Katie insists, so.” He raised an eyebrow. “I think we can agree that’s enough family stuff. Cadets?”

Shiro nodded and set his soda aside.

“Alex and Keith are two first years who’ve been put on the special projects track right away—”

“Horse shit.”

“I checked with Ames. They’re just down the hall from me.”

Matt ran a hand down his face and let out a low groan.

“So they’re in next quarter’s candidate pool? Just like that?”

“That’s what I assume.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Shiro leaned back to rest against Matt’s desk. “And Keith’s that kid we ran into today getting chewed out by Urma. I had another encounter with him in the baths.”

“Encounter?”

“Dropped my shower caddy in front of him. Got mad when he was being… weird and obtuse about living in the dorm.” Shiro frowned and tugged at his bangs. “I don’t like him.”

“You did mention that earlier, yeah.” Matt propped his chin in his hand. “Anything more concrete on why that might be? He threaten you?”

“No… not… not exactly.”

“…How can you ‘not exactly’ threaten someone.”

“I mean he was… polite? Kind of?”

“Fuck sound the alarms right now. A first year being polite is all kinds of suspicious.”

“It wasn’t that, though.” Shiro rubbed the back of his neck, trying to think. “It was like… I dunno.”

“Poetry.”

“His eyes were… not empty, but like… too big? Unnaturally so.”

“You’re pretty much describing Bambi here, Shiro. Hate to tell you.”

“No not big like a—what animal was Bambi?”

“A deer. You godless heathen.”

“Not big like a vapid cartoon deer’s. Big like… depth wise. Or… you know when a not-deer animal looks at you? And there’s some recognition there but it’s… it’s totally foreign? Kind of wild I guess. Kind of curious but fearless, or—ugh.” Shiro leaned forward and rested his head against the table. “Don’t let me babble like an idiot. He feels off, is what I meant to say. And he was acting super weird. Could be arrogance but he didn’t even seem to know that he was in the special projects track yet. He just…” Shiro gestured helplessly and let his arms fall at his sides before lifting his head slightly to stare at Matt.

“Did you not get a weird vibe from him? Am I being totally paranoid here?” Shiro frowned. “I probably should seek council from someone who didn’t cry werewolf in the middle of a routine maintenance check. And from someone who’s not on a first-name basis with imaginary deer.” 

“Firstly, rude, that movie’s an animated classic. Secondly, it depends,” Matt said thoughtfully. “You’re not paranoid if you’re talking about him potentially stealing one of our spots. I don’t like that they’re bringing in ringers so late into the game. Doesn’t bode well.” He raised an eyebrow. “Any other instance of paranoia is probably a bit premature though, yeah. No matter what that ridiculously toned gut of yours says. I mean I’m ready to hate the guy with you, if you want, but I’m not sure he’s worth the energy. Crazy dead stare or no.”

Shiro let his cheek rest against the table and closed his eyes.

“It’s just not fair,” he heard himself say. Childish though it was. “We’ve worked so hard. I don’t understand how the Garrison could do this. Not just to us but everyone else who’s on the track…”

“Yeah, well. Scholarship kids. What’re you gonna do.”

Shiro grunted as Matt poked his arm.

“Have you seen the other one yet? What’s their name?”

“Alex… something. And no, I haven’t. Just Keith.”

“Keith have a last name?”

“Kogane.”

“Cadet Kogane. Boy that just… rolls eerily well off the tongue. Gross.”

“Hopefully it won’t come up that often. I know alliteration is your poison. Although….” Shiro let himself fall to the side and pressed his face against the floor. “Ames said the scholarship kids would be in advanced classes. Meaning after next week—”

“Fuck me, first years in our classes? They introduce the material slow enough with just the regular dunces around. They’ll probably end up creating a time paradox by speaking slower than the speed of sound.”

“As a half-dunce interested in time travel I feel compelled to speak up in my own self-interest,” Shiro mumbled against the tile. He let out a little “oof” noise as a pillow landed on his back.

“Give yourself more credit. You’re a quarter-dunce. At most. Speaking of which, Izaak’s exam? We on to study tomorrow?”

Shiro rolled onto his back and nodded.

“Last exam of the quarter.”

“Yup.”

“One more quarter until placement announcements.”

Matt nodded, a little grin on his face.

“Then we’ll be free of standard specs, free of all of these extra people and classes distracting us—”

Shiro sat up, unable to keep from smiling as well. Lurking paranoia and irritation aside.

“And then space.”

“And then space,” Matt said. “And nothing else.”

-x-

They half-heartedly discussed strategy after that. Matt mostly fiddled with the handheld gaming system his sister had smuggled to him during the last family visit. Shiro mostly watched him fiddle, the routine sounds of Matt swearing at the machine calming him somewhat.

The bell chimed for dinner and they headed to the canteen, bickering good-naturedly about which tracks the characters in the game would have gone for.

“You’re a fool. Rosie is clearly destined for biotech and if you think otherwise then I don’t know what game you were watching me play,” Matt complained as he picked up a tray.

“She is going to manifest corporally and hit you with a wrench until you make her an engineer. And I’ll be conveniently too busy to help you to the med bay.” Shiro grabbed a tray as well and started piling things on it. Mostly fruits. They reminded him of home.

…Somewhat.

He picked up an apple and examined it, making a face.

“I can tell this apple is mealy even through its skin.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” Matt reminded him as he dumped five mini boxes of sugar cereal on his tray. Shiro gave him a disapproving look and with a dramatic roll of his eyes Matt grabbed a thing of baby carrots.

Shiro continued to stare. Matt bristled.

“What! I got a thing that had a green part on it once, what more do you want from me.”

“You kicked my ass so thoroughly in nutritional science. I’m trying to understand how.”

Matt clicked his tongue and continued moving down the line.

“Choking down protein and digestive powders like you do won’t help me with specs. Let me live my life.”

Shiro privately thought that it wouldn’t hurt but he chose to keep his mouth shut. Clearly a sore point still. He’d sadly always been one for prodding hornet’s nests but he was trying to do better.

He finished loading his own tray and then followed Matt to their normal seat in the corner of the canteen. The room was large, enough to house a third of the garrison at a time. Special projects track was assigned the last meal shift—arguably the worst one since most everything was picked over—along with a few other tracks. The canteen was rarely packed, each round table holding ten cadets max, but there were only a few tables at capacity. Their table was located in a corner populated mostly by other special projects kids. There was a bit of a rift between them and the rest of the Garrison. Half of the cadets in the canteen had at one point been on the track and had flunked out. Made for a tense atmosphere.

Matt sat down in his preferred seat (right in the corner) and stretched out his legs.

“Think anyone will risk snagging a seat from us today?”

“Liu might. She’s been warming up to you in p chem,” Shiro said as he took his customary seat. He began peeling his first orange (of three), content to sit and listen to Matt grouse good-naturedly and speculate about the rest of their class.

A dark blur of movement caught Shiro’s attention from across the canteen. 

Keith was standing in line, holding his tray at his side. He was dressed in rec clothes like the rest of the cadets—fitted T-shirt and sweatpants and white trainers. Shiro watched him go through the line, spending far too long in front of each food station. He’d pick up an item, examine it for a few seconds, and either put it on his tray or in the far back of whatever container he’d grabbed it from. He was methodical. And the kid behind him looked ready to hit him upside the head with his tray.

“—and then Rendall upended the entire flask on the table. I’ve never seen anything eat through balsa wood so—…Shiro.”

“Yeah?” Shiro replied absently, still watching Keith.

“I will give you ten creds if you can tell me what I’m talking about.”

“Captain Rendall’s acid accident. Again.”

“Dammit I forgot your creepy ability to multi-task. What’s got your—oh.”

Matt leaned a bit closer to Shiro, following his gaze across the canteen.

“Half of the new recruits of interest, huh.”

“Yeah. He’s acting kind of wei—did he just smell that apple? Who does that?”

“Ten minutes ago you were x-ray-visioning your way through an apple’s skin to speculate as to the texture inside, so I’m going to say you.”

“No—Matt he’s doing that with everything on the food line. He’s been there since we sat down!”

“Ah. Meticulous.” Matt elbowed him in the ribs. “Sounds like someone I know. Your paranoia episode’s starting to make more sense.”

Shiro tore his gaze away from Keith (who was taking an age at the register) and glanced at Matt.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Matt said lightly, “Except that you historically are threatened by people who share similar characteristics to you—”

“Now wait a minute,” Shiro interrupted, starting to get a bit irritated, “that’s not exactly fair—”

“You hate exactly two people in the s.p. track: one who’s almost tied your deadweight lifting record and the other who got the same score as you in the sim.”

Matt sat back in his chair and tossed a handful of cereal into his mouth.

“Deny it if you want, Shirogane, but you’ve got a complex. The only reason you’re not a grade-A asshole is that I’m pretty sure it’s all subconscious. Conscious you could use a bit more arrogance, to be honest.”

“I wasn’t aware I’d signed up for a round of psychoanalysis with my meal,” Shiro muttered, ripping into his second orange. “And I’m not threatened by Merrit or Spencer. They’re both very talented cadets. That’s all I think about them.”

Matt just hummed and ate more cereal. The dry crunching noise was starting to get on Shiro’s nerves and he had to work hard to ignore it. He glanced up from the table once more. Keith had finished paying and was hanging around the register, eyes scanning the canteen. Something in his posture changed when he looked towards their corner. A moment later he started walking towards them, each step purposeful.

Shiro tensed, willing him to sit at any other open spot (which, granted, no other table was as empty as theirs). But Keith ignored everyone else and made a beeline for their table, the length of his stride unusually long for his height. 

Matt had noticed him by this point and had sat up straight. There was a little smirk on his face as he glanced between Shiro and the approaching cadet.

“Oh, okay. This’ll be fun.”

“Shut it.”

Matt made a zipping motion over his lips and sat back again.

Keith stopped in front of their table. He nodded towards Shiro. He was holding his tray a too closely to his chest. Some of the juice cartons looked in danger of tumbling off. And Shiro noted that everything Keith had selected was either canned or vacuum sealed. The kinds of foods they’d had to eat in nutritional health class for a week to simulate station food.

“Hey,” Keith said, his voice going a bit high-pitched. “I, uh. Recognized you. They didn’t tell me the dining hall was this big.”

“I mean it… it has to feed the whole Garrison, so…” Shiro trailed off. Keith was still standing there. His tray had to be digging into his ribs he was holding on to it so tightly. His knuckles were white. And whatever spark, whatever depth and calculation had been in his eyes earlier was gone, as every gaze slowly turned to fix on him. A first year in the middle of third shift dining.

Keith’s shoulders were shaking. Very slightly.

Shiro took a moment to shove his instincts, his residual embarrassment aside, before he kicked out a chair for Keith a few away from his own spot.

“Third shift’s especially bad. It gets deafening in here sometimes. Everyone enjoys arguing too much,” he said. “You can sit with us if you’d like.”

Keith’s grip on the tray immediately relaxed. He set his tray down on the table and then sat, his lips quirking up into a confused-looking smile. He wore the expression oddly well.

“Yeah I’m not so good with all the. Cacophony. Kind of annoying. Thanks.”

He seemed to finally notice Matt and turned to give him a little nod. As he did so his eyes widened in recognition. 

“Oh. You’re the other guy from the hallway. Glasses.”

“Surprised you know my given name,” Matt said, lightly kicking Shiro’s leg under the table in barely-restrained glee. Shiro kicked him back. A bit harder than normal. 

Matt winced but a moment later the smile was back on his face. “Matt’s fine too. Matt Holt, special projects track. You’re Keith, right?”

“Holt like the simulator company Holts?” Keith asked, and then added an absent, “Yeah, I’m Keith,” almost like an afterthought. 

“Yes, Holt-Like-The-Simulator-Company-Holts,” Matt said in clear amusement. “You’ve used them before, I take it?”

Keith nodded as he opened a small can of pears. “Response time on the A-X709 is spotty at best. It’s what they made us take our entrance exams on. I tried to argue that they should’ve used the 05 model but I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously.”

“Is that so,” Matt said in obvious delight. “My good friend Shiro here was complaining about the very same thing the other day. Isn’t that right, Shiro?”

Shiro could feel his face heating up. He shot Matt a glare before turning back to Keith, who was staring at him fixedly. The calculating look was back.

“Are you Takashi Shirogane?”

“…Yeah,” Shiro said warily. Usually when people spelled out his full name it meant they knew his parents. Or knew of them. Both were equally bad.

“I thought so.”

Keith shoved a half a pear in his mouth but then he suddenly froze and turned to look at Shiro.

“Your name was on one of the doors in our hallway,” he said, “I made an educated guess. Or just a guess. It wasn’t—sorry. I should’ve just asked your name. It wasn’t educated it was logical. That’s a better word. Sorry. Again.”

Keith made an irritated noise and stabbed another pear with his fork. He didn’t look up.

Shiro gave Matt a pointed “this is what I was talking about” glance, but Matt just grinned and mouthed, “Like twins” and gestured between the two of them.

Shiro rolled his eyes and kicked Matt’s leg under the table before finally saying to Keith, “Don’t worry about it.”

Shiro returned to picking at his food, for some reason a bit wary of eating next to the first year. It made him feel oddly vulnerable. Matt was having no such trouble and was shoving cereal into his mouth as though his life depended on it.

“So, Keith!” Matt said around a mouthful, “Where’re you from?”

Keith’s lips pulled down in a frown and he took a moment before answering, “Texas.”

“Gets hot there, I bet.”

Keith gave Matt a bizarre look.

“In the summer. Yeah.”

Shiro tensed when Keith’s gaze turned to him again. The other boy watched him for a moment and then said, “I, um. I can sit somewhere else if you want. I don’t care.”

Shiro blinked in surprise, instinctual manners taking over when his voluntary neural pathways abandoned him. 

“You can sit here. We don’t mind.”

“Okay,” Keith said slowly, “I mean you stopped eating. Which I figured—”

Shiro gave in to the little jolt of irritation at being found out. He shoved a few orange slices into his mouth and said as best he could, “There, see? It’s fine.”

Matt had clamped a hand over his, but he managed to wheeze, “God you are so fuckin’ petulant,” before dissolving into irritating snorts of laughter.

Keith was still staring, his eyes narrowed and uncertain. But then a small smile tugged at the corners of his lips. He nodded and turned back to his food, offering the now-familiar, “Thanks,” in reply.

“No problem,” Shiro said as neutrally as he could. He resumed eating more normally, fighting past the weird gnawing in his stomach that made it nearly impossible to fully relax. Keith on the other hand was looking more at ease, his shoulders lowered and his back a bit straighter. 

Shiro grunted as Matt lightly kicked him under the table again. Matt inclined his head towards Keith (who seemed to be staring off into space) and mouthed either “kill him” or “grill him.”

Shiro went with the less messy option.

Grill him. About his interests and abilities, probably. Gauge where he fell in relation to the rest of the track. 

Shiro quickly ran through a few practice questions in his head and then forced himself to adopt as casual a tone as he possibly could. He wasn’t very well-versed in casual. Close family, childhood friends, and Matt being the few exceptions.

“So what would you say got you into the special projects track? Any weak spots instructors pointed out?” he asked politely. Matt gave him a look that blatantly said he was not impressed with Shiro’s attempt at conversation.

Keith, to his credit, answered without much hesitation. “My piloting. And, uh… a lot of things. Calculus in particular...” He furrowed his brows and gave Shiro an odd look. “Not sure why you wanted to know that, but. There you go?”

“Just curious,” Shiro said quickly. “It’s unusual having a first year in our track. Unusual meaning it… it hasn’t ever happened before.”

Keith frowned and stabbed at his pears.

“...Never?” he asked after a moment. His voice was tinged with uncertainty.

“Not since I’ve been here, at least,” Shiro said. Matt nodded in agreement.

Keith’s frown deepened.

“Oh,” he said, his voice very soft. He lifted his head and glanced around the dining hall. “So I guess I shouldn’t be here.”

Shiro fell quiet, not sure how to respond. As much as the other boy was impossible to read and as much as he made Shiro feel on edge, his voice, his hunched shoulders, the plastic fork abandoned in a pool of pear syrup. In those details, he was young, and painfully human. One of the first years crying on the phone to Ames, homesick and terrified of failure.

Shiro fiddled with his orange peel and cast an unsure glance at Matt, who just shrugged, looking torn between interest and polite indifference. Very helpful.

Shiro forced his hands still.

“Did you receive your official assignment yet?”

Keith looked up, his eyes wide.

“Y-Yeah,” he said, his voice catching on the word. “Just before dinner.”

“Did it say special projects?”

Keith nodded.

Shiro picked up a fork and dug into his salad.

Well. That was that. Unlikely the administration was going to change its mind. 

Shiro fell back on his first training. The one thing his parents had taught him that he’d found useful.

Adapt.

“Then it sounds like you should be here.” Shiro gestured to Keith’s tray before he resumed eating. “But tomorrow you need to eat something that isn’t from a can. They work us hard.”

Keith ducked his head, but out of the corner of his eye Shiro could see a bit of color on the other boy’s cheeks. 

“Okay,” Keith said, “I just didn’t recognize anything else up there.”

“You didn’t recognize oranges and apples?” Shiro said incredulously.

Keith gave him an exasperated look that he had no right to make considering they’d had a total of three conversations. And only one of them remotely pleasant.

“I recognize basic fruit shapes and colors,” Keith said dryly. “I meant everything else. The pasta had a weird… white sauce. The bread had stuff on top of it—”

“It’s garlic,” Matt supplied helpfully. “You’ve never had garlic bread?”

Keith shook his head and resumed picking at his food. He didn’t seem interested in supplying more of an answer than just the simple gesture, and an awkward silence fell over the table. Shiro ate what more of his dinner he could, but he kept catching Keith looking at him. Eyes narrowed. Studying. It was unnerving and made Shiro lose what little appetite he’d had left.

Just as Shiro was about to make up some excuse to leave the table, Matt suddenly asked, “So, Keith, not to shine too huge of a spotlight on the elephant in the room, but is there a reason you came over here to sit with us?”

Keith’s cheeks turned pink again. He kept his eyes glued to his tray.

“I don’t know. I recognized, uh…” He paused for a painfully long few seconds, “…Shirogane. And my legs just kind of. Moved.” He lifted his head and looked at Matt. “Seriously if you want me to leave—I’ve been told I have trouble picking up, uh. Subtleties. So it’s easier to just tell me.”

“Noted,” Matt said as he leaned forward, lacing his fingers under his chin. Shiro recognized Matt’s tone—the same one he got when he was confronted with a problem he was positive he could solve before anyone else and was prematurely reveling in his victory. “So your legs just… moved. On their own. When you saw Shiro,” Matt continued. “Interesting.”

Keith’s cheeks went from pink to scarlet. He pressed his lips together and appeared to be thinking for a moment before he said haltingly, “No it—I didn’t want to sit alone since it—I mean it makes you a target. I still haven’t met my roommate and they haven’t met me—I mean obviously they haven’t met me if I haven’t met… them... and I recognized—from the bathroom—we weren’t in the bathroom together. I mean we were, but. Yeah.”

Matt’s grin widened.

“Keith I have to say, if special projects doesn’t work out for you, maybe a career in espionage or politics. You have such a way with words. Might have to tone down a few quirks, though.”

Keith shot Matt a glare that made Shiro tense. But before he could react or tell Matt to chill even slightly with the sarcasm, Keith was on his feet.

“Thanks for toning down the subtlety. I get it.”

Keith grabbed his tray and left without another word. He dumped the rest of his food in the garbage and tossed his tray onto the pile before storming out of the mess hall.

Shiro turned to stare at Matt, not sure if he should be grateful or angry for the (most likely carefully calculated) dig. Matt caught his gaze and then shrugged before sitting back in his chair.

“Sensitive,” he commented. “I honestly didn’t expect that.”

“Yeah, I think the guy who couldn’t recognize garlic bread has definitely been around a lot of sarcasm,” Shiro said slowly. “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t think he would up and leave after one little friendly jab. And we now know we have to up our piloting skills so I don’t consider it a loss,” Matt said, the grin falling from his face. “Also he was making you uncomfortable. And you were too polite to be a jerk and make him leave.” His expression suddenly turned pensive. “He seems taken with you, though. Maybe he is familiar with the Shirogane household name. He could be out to break your mother’s piloting rec—ah.” Matt cleared his throat. “Sorry. Forgot the taboo topic already.”

Shiro stared at the orange peels on his plate, his body tensing with anger and agitation. Matt shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have driven Keith off—

And he shouldn’t have asked that question. Or been so rude based on, what. A gut reaction to something he couldn’t even put a name to? He was more than just his gut reactions, his instinct and his temper. That wasn’t all he wanted to be. 

Shiro thought of the cans stacked on Keith’s tray. 

He stood up, gathering his things.

“I’m going to go make sure he’s all right.”

Matt paused mid orange-juice-sip. He stared up at Shiro.

“Who?”

“The guy you just drove off with your stunning social skills. Who else in this situation could I possibly be talking about?”

Matt made a face but then waved Shiro away.

“Weird you want to run after the guy that gave you the heebie-jeebies, but whatever. We still on for study session tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Library, eight.”

“Great. Enjoy alleviating your guilt.”

Shiro could hear the irritation in Matt’s voice and it took everything he had not to comment on it or throw Matt’s words back in his face. He grabbed his tray and left before he did something stupid.

On the way out of the canteen a fit of agitation overwhelmed him. He slammed his fist into the wall without giving himself time to think or to remember that he’d abused that particular hand once already. He spent the walk back to the dorms cradling his fist and cursing his temper.

Something stupid like that.

Shiro examined his hand. Bruising from the shower. More to come from what he’d just done, most likely, but it was better than punching glass. Or worse, punching Matt. 

He shook out his hand, wincing as it sent shocks of pain up his arm. Even if he hadn’t hit the wall very hard it was still a fucking wall. Would win in a fight with his bare skin and puny human bones at least nine times out of ten. It would probably mess up his specs next week, but he’d take that over possibly rendering his only friend’s face a mess of cartilage and skin goo. 

Shiro pressed his thumb against one of the bruises, the throbbing in his hand reminding him.

Focus.

Find the center. Bring it in. Breathe.

Maybe less wall punching.

The dorm was silent when Shiro got back. Everyone in their track was still at dinner. It took Shiro a moment to remember where Keith’s door was. A moment longer still to dredge up the courage it took to knock. 

Shiro heard rustling inside. Then a loud thud and a quiet curse. 

The door was suddenly yanked open to reveal Keith, standing on one leg and looking extremely pissed off. For a second Shiro wasn’t sure if Keith’s eyes widening meant he was getting ready to punch him or if it meant he was getting ready to slam the door in his face.

But Keith did neither and continued to stand on one leg. The door was open enough that Shiro could see behind him in the room. A few cardboard boxes lay scattered about, one looking as though it had recently been kicked. Or been the perpetrator of a toe-stubbing.

Shiro realized belatedly that he should probably say something and not play Silent Visual Cues Investigator too much longer.

He cleared his throat.

“Ah, so—”

“Does your friend not like me or something?”

The blunt, aggressive question made Shiro take a step back. Keith was staring up at him, aggravated and confused. Like a caged shark, Shiro thought in one nervous flash. The second time in less than two hours he’d compared the other boy to that particular marine animal. 

“I—I don’t know,” he said. Being thrown off-kilter made him honest. 

The answer seemed to satisfy Keith for whatever bizarre reason. Some of the fight left his expression. It was amazing he’d managed to look intimidating at all while nursing a stubbed toe and leaning heavily on a door jam, but.

“Okay,” Keith said, much calmer. “Did you need—I mean. Why are you here, then.”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck, not sure how to proceed. His instincts were still telling him that something was very off about this particular person, hovering awkwardly in this particular doorway.

“I’m sorry he was being—honestly kind of a dick,” he said finally. “Matt’s not the best with people. And I’m not the best at stopping him from being a dick. Or from controlling myself enough to also, uh. Not… not be a dick. To, um. You. In particular. I’m sorry. I was rude earlier.”

Keith crossed his arms during Shiro’s faltering speech. He looked even awkwarder, somehow, balancing on one leg with his shoulder jammed up against the door. His gaze was averted and his expression a bit troubled. And highly embarrassed.

“…You didn’t have to come running after me just to say that,” he finally mumbled. “I didn’t really notice you acting dickish.” He worried at his lip and then glanced up at Shiro. “Were you? Or are you just saying that for some… unfathomable reason. Self-inflicted character assassination is the only thing that comes to mind but that’s not. Typical behavior.”

Shiro blinked in surprise.

“I—… I didn’t even believe you at first about being assigned to this floor,” he said. “I had to check with an administrator, and even then I was still—I didn’t invite you to sit with me at dinner or anything even though you were clearly alone— Look, I was a jerk, I promise.”

“Oh,” Keith said. His voice was very quiet. He looked away again and pulled his arms closer to his chest. “…No offense but that’s a weird thing to promise someone. And I sort of wish you hadn’t told me.”

“I’m telling you because I’m trying to apologize,” Shiro said. He felt about as off-kilter as he ever had. Half of himself was trying to bludgeon what was left of his consciousness into submission with guilt and embarrassment and the other half was telling him he’d done the minimum necessary and to leave before he ended up irritated and punching walls again.

Keith finally met his eyes. He didn’t look impressed.

“You’re not doing an especially good job. And I have to unpack, so.” He took a little step back. “This has been… kind of awful, actually. But apology accepted. I guess.”

He started to close the door, and in a fit of guilt-induced spontaneity Shiro reached out to grab it before it could close.

“Wait—do you need help?” he said. And then immediately pulled his hand away before Keith could slam the door shut and lob off his fingertips.

Keith stared at him as though he’d grown a second head.

“With shutting the door?”

“With unpacking.”

Keith glanced over his shoulder at the boxes. There were about five. And most of them, Shiro noted, were on the small side.

“You can see I have, like. Not many boxes. Right.”

“Yeah,” Shiro said weakly. “It—sorry. I just feel badly…”

“And you want to feel better by going through my stuff?”

“No—yes? I’m… not sure.” Shiro ran a hand down his face. “I really wish I had the brain space to think of a nicer way to say this, but you’re really confusing—this is really confusing, I mean. If you want, I’ll just… leave my apology here. And you can pick it up later. Or… or not. If you don’t feel like it.”

“If I tell you not to look too closely at something, you’ll drop it, right? Assuming it’s not breakable.”

Shiro lowered his hand. Keith was staring up at him. Studying him again. A good deal warier than he had been before. Shiro had a feeling that whatever it was Keith didn’t want him to see, it was something different from the usual porn comics and magazines some cadets smuggled in from weekend trips into town.

“I can do that,” he said. “But I mean—really, if you don’t want my help—”

Before Shiro could finish his thought, Keith pushed the door open and headed over to his boxes. He pointed to the biggest one.

“Linens. I think.”

Shiro cautiously stepped into the dorm room. The set up was the same as his room—two single beds, one lofted on each side with a simple desk underneath. Cadets were allowed to personalize their living space a bit once they were on a specific track. The mysterious Alex had already set up their side of the room. Dark purple sheets, books arranged neatly on the desk underneath the lofted bed. They’d strung up a line of photos, each hung by a colorful paperclip attached to a string of lights. Charts and graphs of formulas, organized neatly, taped to the wall. A few Post-It notes with positive messages scribbled on them. The sort of set-up that suggested they were used to studying, and had been for much of their life.

Shiro resisted the urge to look at their pictures (information collecting or bland curiosity, he couldn’t tell) and sat down to unpack the box of what did indeed turn out to be linens. White ones, scratchy and smelling of bleach. They reminded him of hospital sheets, like the ones that had driven him crazy when he’d had his appendix surgery. He hated hospitals to begin with. The sheets had been the extra bit of irritation that had made him call up his grandmother and demand she discharge him early. His stitches had ripped and he’d had to go back to have them fixed. But it had been worth it to escape the smell and the feeling of sterilization.

Keith, meanwhile, was busy organizing books on his own desk. Organizing meaning… stacking them wherever. He didn’t seem especially concerned that some of the spines weren’t facing the right way. Every fiber of Shiro’s being screamed at him to fix them or to ask Keith what sort of upbringing he’d had that allowed such wanton disregard for common decency. He had to bludgeon the compulsion into the back of his brain. 

Instead he stood up, linens in his arms.

“Do you want me to help make the bed? The loft setup can be kind of annoying—”

“Just throw them up there,” Keith said distractedly. He hadn’t moved from in front of the desk and was fiddling with the drawers, shoving a few things hastily inside. Shiro caught a glimpse of what looked like an old hand radio, a compass, a pocket knife, and something wrapped in a faded bandana before Keith shut the drawer. Again Shiro had to fight the urge to ask. Maybe Keith had some small-scale pirating aspirations. Still not his business.

Shiro threw the sheets and pillows up on top of Keith’s bed and then hung around awkwardly waiting for the other boy to tell him what to do. It seemed to take Keith a minute to remember he was there. Keith stood up, nearly hitting his head on the underside of the bed. He looked oddly flustered and off-balance with his hand pressed against the desk drawer.

“If you’re feeling less guilty or whatever you can leave now. If you want,” he said. “I just have my uniforms and clothes and those aren’t super interesting. Although I guess bed sheets aren’t either.”

Shiro glanced at Keith’s desk. It looked oddly abandoned. Even more than it had when it had simply been empty. A few notes stuck up haphazardly on the wall, in hasty, scrawled handwriting Shiro couldn’t even begin to decipher. Books with ragged covers shoved onto the shelves. Shiro recognized one of the titles—Cartyl’s introductory book on z-accelerator travel and quadrant mapping. A staple for anyone interested in space travel. It stood out on the shelf, ragged compared even to the rest of the collection. Its spine was creased down the middle. Signs of being well-read, well-studied. 

It looked like Shiro’s copy. Nearly identical.

Shiro wondered if the same pages were dog-eared in Keith’s. If Keith had memorized the formulas on page eighty three, if that’s how he ended up in the track. If that was all, like Shiro, he could retain because the rest of the book was so fucking difficult it had to be carried around constantly and referred to. Pictures of its pages kept hidden on phones, checked when teachers and peers weren’t looking. Just to make sure you weren’t misquoting, misremembering.

“You can leave, if you want,” Keith said again. Hesitant. His arms were crossed as he leaned against the desk. He was looking up at Shiro through his dark fringe. “You don’t have to help. You can go.”

Once would have been convincing. But three times was damning. Three times and bleached sheets, ragged book covers, five boxes and z-accelerator travel.

Shiro felt something twist in his gut. Shame and guilt were easy to identify. Pity he quickly kicked out of shape until it more resembled empathy, and it was that particular contorting of his insides that made him say, just as hesitantly, “I can stay, if you want.”

Keith looked shocked. He rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes darting from the desk to the bed, lingering on the pile of linens, to the boxes still on the floor.

“Really?” he said. He sounded incredulous. “Don’t you have something better to do? Friends?”

“Not really, and you’ve met a large percentage of them,” Shiro said. He lightly toed the box. “So, um. Uniforms?”

“What? Oh—oh, yeah.”

Keith quickly knelt down and pried open the box. He kept his head ducked as he did so, but the tips of his ears were bright pink. Shiro sat down again, wondering how someone could traverse the full span of opaque to transparent within the span of a few seconds.

“Do you want me to help hang them up, or—”

“No, just sit there,” Keith ordered, and then added almost as an afterthought, “Please.”

“Are you sure—”

“It’s a one person job and I’m trying to be polite so—yes, I’m sure.”

Shiro closed his mouth and sat. He watched Keith work in silence for a few minutes, not knowing what else he was supposed to do with himself. For as messy as his desk was—and how little he seemed to care about the finer points of organization—Keith worked quickly and methodically. 

Suddenly Keith stopped, a uniform coat halfway on a hanger, and glanced at Shiro.

“…You’re not going to comment?”

Shiro blinked, startled.

“Comment?”

“Yeah or—um. Ask me things. You’re just going to sit there? Without asking?”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck and eyed Keith, not sure where he was going with his line of questioning. “…Do you want me to ask you things?” he finally ventured. It might be better than sitting awkwardly on the floor, chained there by guilt and what was starting to amount to an alarming amount of curiosity.

Keith made a face and muttered, “God, no,” and then looked horrified at his own blunt answer. He quickly turned around and resumed shoving uniforms in his closet. “I mean no. Just no, no—deity. Swearing. I really hate when people ask me stupid questions I clearly don’t want to answer, so I appreciate your silence. That’s all.”

“Oh.” Shiro propped his elbows up on his knees. Keith seemed more relaxed when he talked. And quite frankly the silent, oppressive atmosphere of the small room was starting to get to Shiro, so finally he offered, “You can ask me questions, though. If you’d like. I mean you are new and we used to have this, uh… mentoring kind of program? Not—I don’t consider myself a mentor or anything—”

“Okay,” Keith interrupted. He sounded pleased. “I can ask you anything?”

Shiro hesitated.

“Well maybe not anything, anything, but… I guess?”

“Where are you from?”

Shiro let out a little sigh of relief. A surprisingly normal question.

“Hawai’i. Well, Hawai’i kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“We moved.”

“From where?”

“From another island.”

Keith seemed to accept the answer. He shoved a few things in the closet dresser drawers.

“Is this your second year here?”

“It’s my third... third and a half. I guess. I did this introductory camp thing…”

“Why are you here?”

“Here as in here the Garrison or here as in this mortal coil?”

Keith glanced at him, his brows furrowed.

“Coil?”

“It’s an expression—it means alive. Are you asking why I’m alive?”

“Oh. No.” Keith snorted and went back to work. “That’s a dumb question. I meant why are you at the Garrison?”

“Ah. Hm.” Shiro stretched out his legs, trying to give himself time to think. Keith was a fan of the rapid-fire line of questioning and it was throwing him off. Why was he at the Garrison, though. ‘To spite my parents but also play right into their hands’ seemed… a bit long winded and too on the nose. Even for his tastes.

“Because… there’s somewhere I want to go,” he said carefully, “and this is how I can get there.”

Inside the closet, Keith fell still. Just for a moment before the rustling of cloth and plasticky “tunk” noise of hangers resumed.

“Where’s that?”

Shiro shrugged his shoulders, embarrassed even in front of this person he barely knew. Who he’d already embarrassed himself in front of plenty.

“Where everyone in special projects wants to go, I think. I’m not unique or anything.”

Keith shut the closet door and stared down at Shiro. There was a look of interest on his face, far removed from the distrusting expression he’d worn before. He sat down on the floor, an empty box between them.

“Me too,” Keith said seriously. “That’s why I’m here.”

Keith furrowed his heavy brows, the intense lines on his face deepening.

“…We are talking about space, right. Because there’s a large number of places I don’t super want to go and I’m now realizing I might have sounded all intense over nothing.”

Shiro laughed, surprising himself with what a relief it was to do so. It dispelled some of the weird tension that had been lingering in the air. Even if Keith was now scowling. Half scowl half sulk, really. Made it hard to pinpoint what about him Shiro had felt threatened by.

Keith crossed his arms over his chest again and muttered, “You laughed at me.”

“I—y-yeah, I guess I did,” Shiro said. He hurried to catch his breath and school his expression before the other boy chucked a book at his head. “Sorry.”

“…It’s okay.” Keith frowned. “I was trying to be funny. …I think.” He cocked his head to the side. “You did mean space though, right? I really hate having to ask questions twice but on the off chance that you’re messing with me I’d like to know.”

“Yeah, I mean space,” Shiro said, giving Keith a puzzled smile. “That’s why most of us are here, I think. I just—so few get selected for the program I feel weird saying it aloud…”

“Why? Are you the token idiot in the special whatever track or something?”

“Token might be a stretch,” Shiro said dryly, a prickle of irritation making his words sharper than he’d like. “Idiot definitely isn’t, though. I wouldn’t have passed some of my classes if it weren’t for my tutors and friends. I’m not… innately gifted like some of the people here.”

“…But you got your friends to help you pass.” Keith tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. “That’s kind of a gift. Not everyone’s great with people.”

“…I guess that’s true,” Shiro said. “I do like people. Although I like them a lot more when they’re not getting in my way or turning my homework into toxic orange powder—”

A loud noise startled Shiro into silence. It took him a bit to realize Keith was laughing. More snickering than anything, but his eyes were crinkled up and his lips were curled into an amused smirk. It was such a human expression that Shiro was caught off guard. He fell silent, his brain scrambling to categorize the particular way Keith’s teeth flashed white behind his lips when he laughed. Uncontrolled and uncalculated. Shiro wasn’t quite sure how that piece fit in with the rest of him, the books the sheets the five boxes.

Keith’s laughter quickly died down, and Shiro became hyper aware that he’d been staring. He overcompensated, his voice swinging straight into sardonic.

“It wasn’t that funny. I almost failed the class.”

The grin immediately left Keith’s face, leaving him looking unsure.

“Oh. Uh… sorry. I thought—never mind. Sorry.”

Shiro winced and said quickly, “No—no it’s fine I’m… sometimes I feel like one of those jackasses on reality TV who says shit like ‘I didn’t come here to make friends, I came here to win’ which isn’t true because I think if even two of my peers expressed the same negative opinion about me I’d blink out of existence from hyper introspectivity and a sonic-speed drive to overcompensate…”

Keith was staring at him again. Distrustful and incredulous. Shiro fought the urge to look away.

“…Yes?” he asked hesitantly.

“You’ve never had two people say the same bad thing about you?”

“I—… not to my face, no…”

Keith crossed his arms over his chest and sat back. Shiro could see his fingers tensing against his skin. His nails left little half-moon shapes behind. He didn’t say anything.

Shiro rested his hands in his lap, not sure what to do about the suffocating silence. Should he leave? Would that be ruder than staying? He could ask Keith a question but he vividly remembered the other boy saying he hated being asked pointless questions. That and there was a pocket knife in his desk drawer, easily within reach and Shiro still wasn’t a hundred percent sure that if Keith got too irritated he wouldn’t simply stab him to expedite his leaving.

Shiro did his best to avoid making sudden movements. He frantically cast his mind about for casual topics of conversation. Something to lighten the mood. But because his brain was hardwired in the most pathetically obtuse way, it settled on astrophysics.

“So you’ve read Cartyl’s book on mapping in z-accelerated space?”

Keith looked at him.

“…It’s a requirement for admission. So yeah.” Keith raised an eyebrow. “Have you?”

Shiro went red. He deserved that. 

“It’s a requirement,” he echoed, “so in theory, yes. In practice I, uh. Ended up memorizing most of the pages word-for-word because I had no idea what it was actually saying.”

Keith fell quiet again for a long moment before he nodded and his shoulders relaxed a hair.

“Same. I… I really wasn’t, um. Happy. When they told me a practical exam wasn’t good enough and that instinct—”

“—is no substitute for training.”

Shiro could see the words, a common way for the Garrison to reign in cadets who reveled in breaking simulations. They were written in red ink on the inside of his textbook. Copied once every time he’d been reprimanded. They dug into the page so deeply he could read them with his fingertips. He glanced at the notes above Keith’s desk. Imagined the six words written in the unintelligible scrawl. Like they’d been by his desk for his first two years.

He caught a glimpse of curiosity in Keith’s expression. The other boy leaned a bit closer.

“…So is that a common saying here or something?”

Shiro crossed his legs and leaned away as subtly as he could. Ignored the flames licking the sides of his face as Keith stared fixedly at him.

“It’s common around good pilots, yeah.”

Keith’s pale cheeks instantly grew pink and splotchy and he sat back as though stung. He rubbed at his neck, looking everywhere but at Shiro.

“I—well I mean I had… what was his name. Kristenson, reviewing me, so that’s not that much of a compliment, I guess.”

“Kristenson who couldn’t pilot his way out of a paper bag?”

“Kristenson who couldn’t pilot his way out of an empty Costco parking lot.” Keith ran his fingers through his hair in visible irritation, although the grin was back on his face. “How is he an instructor? He probably thinks auto-pilot is some sort of god-genius and I’m positive the simulator UI can string together a more coherent English sentence. Probably a more intelligent one, too.”

Keith’s sudden burst of enthusiasm was making it hard for Shiro to keep from laughing. He had to bite the inside of his cheek, worried that if he made a noise he’d interrupt and Keith would go back to being quiet. Scowling and intense. 

Shiro rested his elbows on his knees and simply listened to Keith rant for a solid minute about the various levels of idiocy his instructors were subject to. It was more than Shiro had thought the other boy capable of speaking at once. And with a little jolt he realized that this was most likely the Keith that had headed over to his table. All tunnel-vision emboldened by inexpressible impulse. Which explained how during his confrontation in the hallway with Urma the word “sorry” had never crossed his lips and his voice had never wavered (even though he’d come dangerously close to dying twice: once by electrocution in the maintenance shed and once by Captain Urma in the hallway).

Then the lights blinked three times. Keith immediately stopped talking and looked out the window at the storm. It had tapered off, but beads of water were still trickling in steady streams down the glass. Shiro pushed himself to his feet.

“Bunk check in five,” he explained. “Sorry. They run through this stuff in detail with the cadets in first year dorms. There’s no way you’d know the schedule otherwise.”

The color had left Keith’s cheeks again. He nodded and stood as well, holding his arms against himself. He worried at his lip and then said hesitantly, “You let me talk… a lot.”

“It was nice hearing things I agreed with,” Shiro said. “You don’t need to apologize. Assuming—I mean I’m not sure that’s what you were about to do but. Just in case.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Keith mumbled in a petulant way that made Shiro think he was still fighting off the compulsion to do just that. For a moment Shiro was reminded of Matt or Liam or Fitzy in one of their little moments of frazzled exhaustion. He almost reached out to ruffle Keith’s hair, to tease him about how cadets never say sorry they just flunk their next exam when guilt cripples them.

And then Keith shied away from him, the wary look back in his eye. And Shiro remembered where he was and who he was with.

He took a quick step backwards, his face pale. 

“I—I need to head back to my room. Bunk check.”

“You mentioned that.” Keith rubbed his hand against his arm, his eyes darting off to the side. “So are these just like normal room checks? Or do they make us do pushups or something. Recite physics formulas.”

“Just a body count,” Shiro said and then winced at his poor phrasing. “Alive bodies. To clarify. Although I assume they’d still count you if you were dead. But maybe just like. Half a point. Or three quarters. Honestly in special projects they care the most about our brains so as long as the brain was intact and could be wired to a computer or shoved in an AI-bot they probably would still mark the person as present—uh…”

Keith was giving him a strange look. Shiro guessed he was trying to decide whether to smile or raise an eyebrow. His indecision was causing his various facial features to twitch alarmingly.

“…So what you’re telling me is that as long as I avoided stabbing someone in the brain I could get away with a bit of light murder?” Keith finally asked. He’d settled on smiling and the cocky grin was back on his face. Shiro thought it was highly likely that Keith had gotten punched a lot as a kid. Considering he seemed incapable of smiling like a normal person. 

Shiro didn’t feel like punching him, though. Or doing anything apart from wondering for one paranoid moment if Keith was joking or not and then turning crimson when he realized that he was. And Keith not smiling like a normal person was doing a good job of making it difficult to remember why Keith not feeling normal should be a problem at all. Rendered the unease Shiro had been harboring all day into something much more difficult to categorize, even as it twisted his insides in some alarmingly similar ways.

Shiro quickly forced down the rising cocktail of confusion and panic before he went on an introspection spiral in the middle of this veritable-stranger’s room. “In theory you could as long as it stopped at light murder. But I wouldn’t test my theory without doing some serious legwork first,” he managed to say. “You could start with stealing some brains from the med lab and placing them strategically around the Garrison. See if they get yelled at for being out of uniform.”

Keith’s shoulders shook, and it took Shiro a bit to realize he was laughing again. The silent kind.

“Does the med lab have an excess of spare brains just floating around or would someone need to harvest them first?”

“Harvest—if you’re worried about playing the long-con and convincing people there’s no way you could be a murderer that’s probably the worst verb you could pick,” Shiro said. He felt a little burst of… pride, maybe, when Keith laughed again. Just a few gulps of air and quiet chuckles but still. Counted.

The lights flashed again and Shiro cursed. Bunk check was starting. Their rooms were in the middle of the hall so he had about a minute left. Speaking of which—

“You haven’t met your roommate yet, have you?” Shiro asked. He’d feel a little less responsible if Keith had someone else to be lost with.

Keith shook his head.

“Just their stuff.” He scowled. “And I didn’t really like their stuff.”

“…Can I ask why?”

Keith made a little grunting noise as he thought and then shrugged. “They have too much of it.”

His face suddenly went pale and he took a step towards Shiro.

“Wait—wait so if I’m here does that mean I don’t get any orientation stuff? Tomorrow’s Saturday, right? What do you guys do on Saturdays.”

Shiro found himself staring down at a pair of large, nervous eyes. Keith was… awfully close. Somehow his inability to carve out appropriate personal space was unsurprising. The sudden change from “too far” to “too close,” however, was.

Shiro had to work hard not to take a step backwards.

“S-Study, mostly,” he said. “Or train. We have specs every week and… and maintenance is… uh… sometimes we go into town for a break day but since you just got here…”

“So it’s free time.”

“Y-Yeah. Free—”

There was a knock on the door.

Shiro groaned and pressed a hand against his face. Bunk inspection. This would be his first real demerit…

“Great.”

The door clicked and opened and Instructor Brighton stepped in, a clipboard in his large hand. He almost had to duck to fit through the door frame. As he stared down at the two cadets he raised an eyebrow. There was a smirk on his face and when he spoke he sounded far too pleased with himself.

“Well, well. Shirogane out of his room after hours. And already corrupting our newest recruit…”

Shiro stood at attention, fighting back his irritation. Brighton was one of his… lesser liked instructors. The man was young and arrogant and the concept of using a voice appropriate for indoors seemed to have missed him.

And what kind of monster stopped at two “well”s when trying to sound smug. He couldn’t even do “arrogant asshole” properly.

“Apologies, sir,” Shiro said. “I was helping the new cadet settle in.”

“Really,” Brighton drawled as he leisurely began writing on his clipboard. “I’m sure the brass will be delighted to know you’re so welcoming.”

Keith had fallen silent and was hovering slightly behind Shiro, staring up at Brighton.

“He was, though,” Keith said after a moment. Shiro subtly cleared his throat and glanced at Keith, and the other boy added a grudging, “sir.”

Brighton’s eyes slid up from his clipboard to focus on Keith. There was a calculating glint to them that made Shiro shift his weight, just enough to put him completely between Brighton and Keith.

“I would like to retire to my own bunk, sir. For check,” Shiro said. “If you’re finished here.”

That got the instructor’s attention. He tapped a few more times on his clipboard. “I’ve sent the report off, so a check’s rather pointless now, golden boy. I docked your roomie too, just for good measure. Lest you forget you’re responsible for each other. And you—Kogane, right?”

Keith gave a terse nod, and Brighton grinned. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“Careful who you ask for help in the future. I’m not one to spread gossip but Shirogane here’s got a bit of a temper.”

Shiro tensed, his stomach churning with embarrassment. He risked a quick glance at Keith, but if the other boy was at all phased he didn’t show it. All he said was a rather disinterested, “Noted. Sir.”

Brighton rolled his eyes and muttered, “Another special in special projects. Figures.” He turned to leave, waving his clipboard over his shoulder.

“Bunks, cadets. Lights out in ten.”

“Sir.”

Brighton stepped out into the hallway, shutting the door behind him with an authoritative thud.

Shiro let out a slow breath, trying to shake off his lingering agitation. He tugged at his hair and glanced at Keith out of the corner of his eye.

“Sorry about—I don’t know. Him. And me.”

Keith raised an eyebrow.

“Why are you apologizing. And don’t you have to leave.”

“I already have the demerit. There’s no point in—and because I… I mean he’s right. And I got you in trouble on your first day.”

“Right about what. And it’s fine. I’m already in trouble, apparently, with the big lady instructor. Ur… Ursula.”

Shiro did his best to shove his temper-bruised hands into his pockets without drawing too much attention to them. Keith’s eyes blatantly tracked his every move which made the whole endeavor feel rather pointless.

“Captain Urma. And I meant he was right about the… the temper. Thing. My temper.”

“Oh. Yeah, I don’t care.” Keith bent down to pick up the empty boxes and began dismantling them. Shiro watched him, confused.

“You don’t care.”

“Yeah.” Keith shoved the broken down cardboard into his closet and then turned to face Shiro again. “I mean I kind of guessed. Already.”

“Wh—you did?” Shiro said weakly.

Keith nodded and pointed to Shiro’s pockets.

“I thought I heard you punching the shower. And your knuckles are all fuc—messed up.” He frowned and suddenly looked a bit uneasy. “Also I think you were maybe trying to scare me off or threaten me earlier. In, uh. In retrospect. When you were stomping around the hall and getting pissed off about my name being on the door.” Keith moved to hop up onto his bed and started to fix the sheets. Shiro watched him, not sure what to think or feel. Other than like he’d swallowed half a dozen rocks.

“But—you still let me into your room.” he said. “Why?”

Keith peered down at him from his bunk, a little frown on his face. His brows were furrowed again. Thinking.

“I guess because… I dunno. Usually people don’t even bother threatening first so it seemed like kind of a courtesy. It’s easier to just… you know.” Keith mimicking punching. “At least for me. That and… uh..”

Keith’s face turned splotchy pink again. He moved to fix his pillows, but Shiro still heard him mumble, “You came and found me and you didn’t have to.”

Shiro felt his own face go red. He shifted awkwardly from side to side. Trapped and uneasy and not sure how to escape or even if he should. The air felt delicate, like it would shatter if he moved too quickly. There was still the knife in the drawer and the empty desk and five boxes and no pictures and harvesting brains and light murder and eyes that tracked his movements. But at the center of all of that was this other seemingly-just-a-person. Hell-bent on pretending that smoothing out a bed sheet for the thousandth time was the most interesting thing in the world so he wouldn’t have to look down from his loft and see Shiro standing there in the middle of his room, lost and useless and feeling like whatever had possessed him earlier that day was a few systems north of animosity. Trying to ignore the something there, almost tangible. Something alien and frightening, keeping him in that room. That had compelled him there to begin with.

Shiro stared up at the other boy. Watched him run his hand over his arm. His fingernails found anxious purchase on his skin. Dark eyes darted to the side, wanting to look but too stubborn to give in.

Shiro felt something tighten in his chest.

“Who are you?”

The soft question made Keith fall still. Then he turned and swung his legs over the side of his bed. Looked down at Shiro, his messy hair falling into his eyes. Distrusting, contemplative, and sad.

He crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged his shoulders again in what was quickly becoming a familiar gesture.

“I’ll let you know.”

The room fell still until all Shiro could hear was his heartbeat, steadily racing against his chest. And all he could see was Keith’s dark, dark eyes, swallowing up every inch of his vision like a starless, inky night. A soft cold burrowed inside his chest. Comforting and familiar. It made his skin prickle and every nerve stand on end. Waiting. Waiting, stretching out into the blackness. Starfields clawing out of hibernation and winking into existence underneath his skin. Blindingly complex and bright.

And then Keith blinked. A wave of crimson colored his cheeks. He pressed his hands against his face and fell backwards, lying on the bed. He didn’t move.

The tether that had been holding Shiro in place snapped the moment Keith looked away. He shook his head, trying to clear away some of the fog lodged in the cracks in his brain. His temples were throbbing like every vein encircling his skull was going to explode.

And his skin was freezing.

Shiro shook his head again and pressed a hand against his temple.

“Keith?”

A grunt in reply.

Shiro frowned and took a step closer to the bed. That hadn’t been a very reassuring response.

“You okay?”

Another grunt. Rustling of fabric as Keith pushed himself up to glance warily down at Shiro.

“…I’m having a really weird day.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Did you do something to me.”

Shiro bristled, wanting to ask Keith the same thing.

“No! Not—what would I have done?!”

“I don’t know!” Keith frowned and pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “But my head hurts and I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with a fever or something. And I keep talking like an idiot. Normally I don’t vocalize that shi—that stuff. Especially not in front of—not when I’m new somewhere.”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck and then glanced at his hand in surprise. His skin was slick with sweat. Parts of his T-shirt were sticking to him like he’d just run a marathon. 

What the hell…

The lights blinked once and then went out. Keith let out a startled yelp, and for a brief, panicked moment Shiro thought that maybe he’d willed the lights off, that somehow in the course of this utterly bizarre conversation he’d gone full X-Men and mutated into some sort of fluorescents wizard. But then the intercom crackled to life and Ames’ cheerful voice rang out over the compound. Lights out. Just like normal.

In the dark he could see Keith glaring at the ceiling. His hand was pressed against his chest, which was rising and falling rapidly. His shirt was clinging to his skin. Dark with sweat.

Shiro filed that detail away. Tried not to think too hard about it.

“It’s lights out,” he said helpfully, just as Ames’ voice chirped, “Lights out, everyone!”

Keith gave him a bland look.

“Yeah, I gathered.”

“Sorry. It—I thought that maybe—”

“I did too. It’s okay.”

Shiro let out a slow breath and then forced a neutral smile on his face.

“All right. I should go. Hopefully your roommate will show up soon.”

Keith made a noncommittal noise and hopped off his bunk. He landed somewhat gracelessly on the hard tile floor and took a moment to right himself. He rubbed his shin and glared up at the bed.

“That’s farther than it looks.”

“My second day here I fell out of my bunk and smashed my head against the floor,” Shiro said. “Matt likes to bring that up whenever I do poorly on an exam. You okay?”

Keith nodded and his lips twitched upwards for a moment.

“Fine. Uh… so.” He cleared his throat. “Thanks again for helping. Sorry it—sorry it was weird? I think.”

“It’s okay,” Shiro said quickly. “Really I… I’m glad I could help. Even if all I did was sit on the floor.” He gave Keith a little nod before heading towards the door, needing more than anything to go be alone for a bit to try and process everything.

A little noise caught his attention. He stopped in the doorway and glanced at Keith. The other boy had taken a step after him but was standing frozen and looking annoyed with himself. When he saw Shiro looking at him he quickly stepped back again, worrying at his lip and crossing his arms.

“Hey, uh…”

Shiro saw Keith swallow heavily, his throat bobbing with the motion.

He let go of the doorknob and turned to give Keith his full attention. And quickly hit himself in the leg when his heart rate decided to pick up again from nerves. Annoying.

“Yeah?” he said as normally as he could.

Keith immediately averted his eyes and pressed his lips together in a stubborn frown.

“Can I come find you tomorrow?”

The question was so quiet, so embarrassed and hopeful that Shiro had to strain to hear. He hesitated in answering, images of Matt’s irritated face and the isolated weekend gym he normally enjoyed alone making him falter. 

And there was fear there, too. The rough carving of it he’d shoved away for the time being but that would come rolling back into view the moment he let it. Coloring neon words behind his eyelids all spelling out in different variations that something was off. Here with this and with them. Skin shouldn’t go cold like that and leave him feeling like his lungs were crushed. A can at the bottom of the ocean. He shouldn’t find it inexplicably familiar. Being that empty, that dark for so much, and then coldly, horribly supernova bright.

He should say no. He needed distance, he needed to be able to label whatever was going on before paranoia and hyper-analyzing took over. 

And more importantly he needed to not fail his last exam. Or specs.

But Keith was still standing there. Expectantly and embarrassed, and so normal in the way he wrapped his arms around himself and tried to look neither expectant nor embarrassed. 

Just another kid.

Shiro felt something inside of him uncurl. Relax. Enough that he could earnestly say, “Of course,” and really mean it.

The look of surprise and utter relief on Keith’s face, however, made him flush. He turned around and grabbed the door handle again.

“Stop that, it’s not a big deal.”

“It—y-yeah. You’re right. I guess.”

Shiro pressed a hand against his face. Keith sounded so pleased it was making him want to melt into the floor out of embarrassment. He wasn’t used to having so much attention focused on him.

“It’s really not. I promise.”

“I said you’re right—I’m agreeing with you! And get out, you’re gonna get in more trouble!”

“I’m leaving—look my hand’s on the doorknob!”

“You haven’t moved in like five minutes!”

“Because you’re still talking—Good night!”

Shiro yanked open the door and fled into the hallway, barely catching Keith’s flustered, “Good night?”

The door clicked shut behind him, and Shiro was alone in the hallway. He slowly leaned against the wall, his heart still hammering away in his chest. Normal hammering. Not whatever had happened earlier.

Shiro raked a hand down his face and then slowly pushed himself away from the wall to head back to his room. His roommate was already in bed, evidenced by the giant lump buried underneath the covers. Just as well. He’d probably pick up on Shiro’s weird mood and hound him with questions. Liam was normally quiet and studious but when he got wind of some sort of drama or interpersonal conflict he became irritatingly talkative.

Shiro peeled off his T-shirt and shorts, tugging on clean ones before he headed into the bathroom. There was water splashed all over the mirror, evidence of someone hastily brushing their teeth. Shiro took his time, concentrating unnecessarily hard on every mundane action to keep his brain from wandering.

When he finally crawled into bed, however, any semblance of distraction was ripped away. He lay there staring up at the ceiling, his mind racing in little panicked circles, all amounting to the same pressing question.

What the hell was that.

His tablet lit up.

The sudden light nearly blinded him, and it took him a moment to grab the thing and turn its dimness down to a less eye-scourging level. The little notification icon was blinking. Only one person dared risk getting caught sending messages past lights out.

Shiro clicked open the app and read over Matt’s flurry of texts.

/So I was a bit of a jerkoff earlier. That’s on me./  
/Jerkoff do we say that/  
/Jerk… ass? No that’s not right./  
/Jerk/  
/Just a jerk, we’ll go with that./  
/Did you track down Dark and Mysterious?/

Shiro fought not to roll his eyes. He pulled the covers up over his head to hide the light.

/Matt it’s Very Late. To borrow your irritating typing convention./

/You misspelled “charming.” Charming typing convention. So did you find him./

/In his room./

/And?/

/And what./

/How was he?/

Shiro frowned and hesitated a moment before replying.

/Dark and Mysterious./

/I forgot your humor quadrant shuts off after lights out./

/I was being serious to try and trigger some sincerity in you, but whatever./

It took a bit for Matt’s next message to come through.

/Sorry, someone patrolling the halls./  
/And what do you mean you’re serious. Did he metamorphose into a soap opera villain or something?/

/Yeah but not before he showed me the corpse of his twin he murdered./

/Okay I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking anymore. What are you trying to convey, here./

/That he’s. I don’t know. Off./

Shiro worried at his lip and then typed,

/But I think I’m off, too./

Matt’s little icon stopped blinking for a long while before finally it lit up again.

/Do you wanna talk about it?/

/Not right now. I got a demerit for not being in my room for check so I don’t want to drag this on for too long. We can talk tomorrow./

/You got a demerit? Ha. Well you can pick up your membership badge tomorrow. Welcome to the delinquents, Shirogane. We’re glad to have you./

/Missing bunk check is the most anticlimactic way to plunge into delinquency. Membership rejected until I do something better. Like bleach my hair or steal Captain Urma’s motorcycle./

/You’d make a lousy blonde, I wouldn’t recommend it./

Matt’s icon flashed on and off for a bit, like he was typing and erasing for a long time. So long that Shiro started to drift off, the banal conversation keeping his more troubling thoughts at bay. Finally a message popped up.

/Hey so. We’re cool, right. Just to ask./

Shiro peered at the message through half-lidded eyes. Cool… what—

Oh.

/Yeah, we’re fine. I’m sleeping, talk to youl a ter./

He shoved the tablet under his pillow and closed his eyes again. His mind had thankfully gone quiet. Too exhausted to do much more than spin a few lazy circles in an inky, starless sky.

-x-

Shiro had never once remembered his dreams. They faded within seconds of waking, images drawn in condensation on the side of a glass. Sometimes he woke up drenched in sweat, tears stinging his eyes. Sometimes he woke up laughing. Sometimes sick to his stomach, cold. Maybe those were the remnants of dreams. He wasn’t sure.

When he woke up the day after meeting Keith, bits and pieces of a dream were stuck to the inside of his skull. They lingered, detailed and vivid almost to the point of pain. 

Shiro lay in bed, trying to reconcile the fact that he apparently did dream with the fact that he found the whole thing to be rather disappointing. There’d been no narrative. When he was young, his cousin had dreamed often of being a space captain. She’d told him everything, every unwanted nuance of plot she’d experienced while she’d been asleep. Shiro thought that’s what dreams were, stories, and was annoyed that all that seemed to have stuck with him, his first recountable dream, were a few images. Dominated by one, harsh light.

A hydrogen star, brilliantly violet. Burning out its last in a sea of dark, metal ships.


	2. Hull

Shiro drummed his fingers against the table.

“So how many, do you think?”

Matt didn’t grace him with so much as a look. He continued scribbling in his notes, several textbooks spread out on the library table around him. The building was somewhat isolated from the rest of the Garrison. A round structure connected by a single hallway, made almost entirely of photovoltaic glass that served as a backup power supply for the complex. On weekdays it was jammed with cadets who squirreled themselves away behind twisting rows of books and datachives. 

Today they were more or less alone. Sitting at their table surrounded by bookshelves, as far away from the entrance as possible

“How many what, Shiro.”

Shiro propped his chin in his hands, his knee bouncing restlessly as he stared out the painfully wide, wide windows into the desert. Sunlight streamed through the cloudless blue sky, ripping cracks in the parched earth. A lizard scuttled into the shade cast by the library. Its little chest was heaving up and down. Anxiety attack. Did lizards get anxiety attacks.

Shiro pressed a fingertip against the glass. The lizard didn’t seem to notice.

“How many birds crash into this thing. It has to be classified as a major wildlife hazard.”

“Shiro we’re in the middle of the fucking desert. There’s probably a grand total of five birds in a thousand kilometer radius.”

Shiro frowned when the lizard scurried away. Back out into the sun. Chest heaving.

“That’s still five potential deaths, even if we are in the middle of the fucking desert.” He rested his head in his arms, his knee still bouncing. “Maybe just a medium hazard then. Light hazard.”

He heard Matt pause his scribbling.

“…Are you feeling okay?”

Shiro grunted a little “yes” and then lifted his head just enough to look at Matt. “Why?”

Matt reached out and tapped a textbook with his pen.

“You studied for all of five minutes—”

Shiro narrowed his eyes and Matt amended, “Fine, two hours. But that’s still roughly seven hours fewer than you usually cram for a final. And you keep fidgeting. Which I thought I’d never see you make an unnecessary movement of any kind, so that’s a surprise. I mean I don’t care, I’ve been rewriting Xena scripts in my notebook for the past thirty minutes, but…”

Shiro slowly pushed himself up and rubbed the back of his neck. He needed a haircut. His neck was starting to feel scratchy.

“I’m not too worried about it. We crammed a bit on Thursday and we still have tomorrow. And with Izaak you know you can say ‘well it’s still just a theory’ and he’ll start arguing with himself and then forget if he said something brilliant or if you said something brilliant and give you full marks because he doesn’t want the administration to find out he can’t teach.”

“True… true,” Matt said thoughtfully. “Glad you’re feeling confident. Or apathetic. Either way.”

“Neither, really,” Shiro said. He rubbed his neck again, his fingers twitching. “I’m just having a hard time concentrating.”

“Not enough sleep?”

“Dunno.” Shiro looked out the window again. “Restless.”

“As in rest space less, as in missing rest as in you didn’t get enough sleep which is what I just asked you and you denied. Clearly lying to me and breaking our one—our third rule.”

“It’s not that kind of restless.” Shiro stared at a crack in the desert floor. “It’s the misplaced kind. As in I feel like I’m in the wrong place.”

He heard Matt groan.

“That has to be the most obtuse way to say you don’t want to be indoors. Go outside if you want. You’re the only freak that gets his jollies sprinting through the fucking desert.”

“I’m trying to find all five birds. Personal quest.”

Matt opened his mouth to reply but then a little grin stole over his face. He ducked his head and resumed his silent scribbling. Shiro raised an eyebrow. Lightly kicked him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Matt said innocently. “Someone’s doing a bad job of remaining inconspicuous, is all.”

Shiro glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see Liam or Karli or one of the other cadets who enjoyed bothering him in the library when he was trying to get work done. But there was no one behind him, ready to clobber him with a thousand questions about sim practice. Shiro cast his gaze around, a bit of movement finally catching his eye. In the shadows of one of the bookshelves, looking conspicuously preoccupied with a datachive’s labeling, was Keith. Unlike the day before, he was dressed in a cadet’s uniform, a requirement for using the library. He had a bag slung over his shoulder that looked a little worse for wear. His hair was falling into his eyes, and he was worrying at his lip as he ran his thumb over the label. Twice.

“—ro.”

Keith reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind his ears, his frown intensifying.

“—iro.”

They were kind of pointy. His ears, not the hair lock. Hair lock? Hair… strand. His hair looked comically fluffy. Like a stuffed animal’s. He must have just showered—

“Shiro oh my god.”

Shiro wrenched his gaze away from Keith and glanced at Matt.

“What?”

Matt held up his hands, the shit-eating grin back on his face.

“Sorry for interrupting. The glare’s a bit much, though.”

“I’m not glaring. And interrupting what?”

Matt snickered as he gathered his things. “Oh I would very much love to take a stab at answering that question, but sadly I m needed elsewhere. Promised Garvey I’d help him with calc.” He shoved his books in his bag and lightly clapped Shiro on the shoulder as he passed.

“Good luck with the restlessness. See you tonight.”

“…Sure?” Shiro said, utterly lost. He watched Matt leave down a different corridor than the one Keith was standing in. Keith didn’t appear to have noticed Matt’s leaving. He’d pulled the datachive off the shelf and was leafing through it. Every so often he would pause on a page and activate one of the chips inside, dark eyes quickly scanning the projection before dismissing it and moving on. Shiro watched him for a few moments, not sure how or if he wanted to approach the other cadet. Maybe it was the garish orange uniform throwing him off, but the odd intensity Shiro had felt the night before had abated. Just a bit of lingering pinpricks under his skin. Which could be chalked up to his arm falling asleep.

When it became obvious that Keith wasn’t going to move any time soon, Shiro pushed himself up out of his chair and headed over. Keith had paused on a page in the datachive that was projecting a picture of the Garrison under construction. Shiro waited politely for Keith to notice him, but after a few moments he gave up being patient and cleared his throat.

Keith let out a quiet gasp of surprise and slammed the datachive against his chest as he whirled around. He immediately looked annoyed at himself for his reaction, but didn’t let go of the archive.

“…Hey,” Keith said, after a long pause.

“Hey.” Shiro rubbed the back of his neck. “So you found me.”

Keith’s death grip on the datachive slowly unclenched. He nodded, his lips twitching up into a smile for a fraction of a second before he frowned.

“Sorry to be all, uh. Lurky. You were with your friend—”

“Matt.”

Keith pressed his lips together. Shiro could practically see him batting the name aside.

“…You were with your friend. Matt.” Every word was given equal weight as he spoke. “And I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“You wouldn’t have been interrupting,” Shiro said as reassuringly as he could. “I was waiting for you.”

Keith jerked backwards a bit as though stung. Then he stared up at him, eyes wide.

“You—you were waiting for me?”

Shiro blinked, caught off guard. He cast his mind back, not really remembering having even said the words, let alone felt… waiting.

He glanced down at his hand. His fingers had stopped twitching. Despite the prickling feeling still pinging little star bursts underneath his skin.

“I…uh.”

He felt his cheeks color.

“You did say yesterday that you’d—that you’d track me down today. So... maybe. I don’t know.”

He glanced at Keith, worried.

“Is that okay?”

Keith tapped his fingers against the datachive and then turned to reshelve it. The tips of his ears were pink again. Pointy ears.

“Is what okay? You not knowing something?”

“It feels like a stupid thing to not know,” Shiro mumbled. “Considering I said it.”

“Yeah, well. Lots of people say stuff they’re not sure of or don’t know.”

Keith fell still, his hand still lingering on the spine of the datachive, his back to Shiro.

“I… It’s okay if you don’t mean it. Still nice to hear. Or whatever.”

He turned around, his expression much more relaxed.

“So why are our uniforms orange. Is it in case we try and escape.”

Shiro let out a quiet breath of relief and shoved his lingering feelings of unease and… inadequacy aside. He raised an eyebrow, a little grin on his face.

“Is that what you were looking up in the archive?”

“No.” Keith glanced up at the glass ceiling. “I was looking up what genius thought it would be a good idea to build an all-glass dome in the middle of the desert.”

“Someone with a greenhouse fetish. That’s my only guess.”

Keith made a face.

“I don’t like that you put those two words together.”

“Yeah, you know, as soon as I said it I had regret,” Shiro said. “But that’s become my default emotion as of late so it didn’t really register right away.”

“As of late meaning… in the past forty-eight hours?” Keith asked. Shiro could hear the forced casualness in his voice.

“No—no, I meant more the past, uh… let’s say two quarters of my academic career. Physical chemistry. … Honestly the term ‘mortal enemy’ comes to mind.”

Keith’s expression fell. He rubbed his arm and looked out the window.

“And I’m going to have to be in those classes?”

“The whole special projects track is so small that we all take classes together. The instructor gives different levels different tasks, but we’re all expected to check each other’s work,” Shiro said, trying to sound as helpful and positive as he could since Keith was starting to fold in on himself. Like he was origami-ing his bones.

Keith nodded in reply, his shoulders still horribly hunched. After a moment, however, he made a frustrated noise and hit himself in the forehead.

“I hate being nervous about stupid classes! Why can’t they just put me in a sim?!”

“Cadet! Voice down!”

The disembodied voice of the Librarian pierced their eardrums from within the bookshelf. Shiro winced and clamped his hands over his ears, even though it was a pointless exercise (pin-pointed sound bursts couldn’t really be blocked). He glared at the speaker.

“Third level volume on the first infraction. That’s not really fair,” he muttered.

“Did the books just yell at me?!”

Shiro wordlessly pointed to the small emitter hidden in the metal of the shelf. Keith said a quiet, “Oh.”

Shiro absently clapped Keith on the shoulder as reassuringly as he could. Librarian was already fixed on them. They should probably change locations. Fourth level was ear-splitting and he really didn’t fancy having a headache for the rest of the day.

Shiro moved to gather his things and then slung his bag over his shoulder. When he turned around, Keith was staring at him, an upset look on his face.

“You’re leaving?”

Shiro paused.

“Yeah. The Librarian system doesn’t ever decrease in volume. Only increase. I generally like to leave before my brain bifurcates.”

“Oh…ah. Okay.”

Keith let out a slow breath. Then squared his shoulders and gave Shiro a formal nod.

“Thanks for spending time with me today. I appreciate it.”

Shiro blinked.

“…What?”

Keith’s expression faltered. For a moment he looked devastated before he scraped himself together again.

“I—I said thanks for spending time with me today—”

“You don’t want to come with me?” Shiro asked, confused and a bit hurt.

Keith’s dark eyes widened. He shifted his weight back and forth a few times, his hands falling to his sides. Then shoved into his pockets.

“I was not aware that was an option,” he said finally. “…Is it a serious one?”

“Yes it’s—I’m not going to fake invite you somewhere,” Shiro said. “I don’t really have the energy for that, to be honest. And subterfuge isn’t a talent I’m especially interested in fostering.” His expression darkened as he remembered Matt’s dig about his legacy status and it took a moment to bash the images away. His knuckles were still blotchy and purple. He didn’t need to make them worse.

The lingering bite of Matt’s words quickly faded as a slow, brilliant smile lit up Keith’s face. Just for a moment before his stone-crafted expression reappeared.

“Oh. Then yeah. Thanks.” He tilted his head to the side. “Where’re we going?”

Shiro hummed in thought, tilting his head back to look up at the glass ceiling. He immediately had to shade his eyes. Mistake.

“Depends what you want to do. Study? Weight lifting? Specs training? I’d offer sim training but they’re off limits during finals week.”

“What does specs training involve?” Keith stared up at the ceiling too. “And what are you looking at.”

“The sun. And running, jumping, climbing… some combat training if you’re in the forces track.”

“For a moment I thought you meant that specs training involved the sun. Which would be a lot more interesting than running or jumping.”

Shiro snorted, a little smile tugging at his lips. “And climbing and combat training?”

He heard Keith shift and then mumble, “I might have gotten in trouble for that last one at my former school.”

“Oh?”

“…Yeah. We uh. We didn’t call it combat training, though.”

“What’d you call it?”

“…Punching.”

Shiro winced and then glanced at Keith.

“Punching what.”

Keith raised an eyebrow.

“Are you wanting an itemized list?”

“…Kind of, now that I know there’s enough things to constitute a list.”

Keith crossed his arms over his chest, his brows furrowing again. He fell quiet for a long time.

“Lockers, mostly,” he said at last. “And people, once. But apparently once is enough.”

Shiro winced.

“People… plural?”

“Started singular. But the singularity had cronies, and the cronies had agendas, so… became plural.”

Shiro fell quiet, not sure how to respond. The other cadet was looking everywhere but at him. Probably waiting for a lecture.

Shiro was too tired for a lecture. And it would just be a stream of hypocrisy, anyway. Instead he hummed quietly to show he’d heard, and then asked in all seriousness, “…Did you win?”

Keith turned to stare up at him. His heavy brows were furrowed. Then he tilted his chin up, the smirk on his face once more.

“I’m not in the business of losing.” His smirk widened. “Especially not against lockers.”

Shiro laughed and gestured to his hand. “Maybe you could give me a few tips because I sure as hell lose out against a lot of inanimate objects.”

“The trick is to stop caring about your own well-being and focus entirely on—”

“CADETS!”

Both Shiro and Keith immediately clamped their hands over their ear as the Librarian speakers blared. Shiro swore quietly and then without thinking reached out to grab Keith’s wrist, dragging him away from the speaker.

“Fucking Librarian system—”

“LANGUAGE, CADET!”

Shiro kept a tight hold on Keith’s wrist as he led them through the labyrinth of bookshelves and out into the connector hallway. Unlike the library it wasn’t air-conditioned, and the sun beating down through the glass panels made the long stretch of corridor stiflingly humid. It wasn’t until Shiro’s hand started to sweat that he realized he was still holding on to Keith’s wrist. He let go with a quiet apology but Keith just said an absent, “Don’t worry about it,” before quirking Shiro a little grin.

“You are bad with inanimate objects. Retreating without putting up a fight, even.”

“Look you haven’t heard that thing when it really gets going,” Shiro muttered. “My first summer back here I was minding my own business and trying to play academic catch-up and it kept screeching at me whenever I read my notes aloud or—”

“Where are we going?”

Shiro faltered and then stopped to take stock of their surroundings. They were in one of the junction nodes. Keith was staring curiously at an airlock map on the wall.

“For bad sandstorms,” Shiro explained. “And… the gym, I guess? Since sim practice is out and I take it you wouldn’t really be interested in studying.”

“I have two weeks of orientation and conditioning before I’m put into classes. So no. I’m not.” Keith glanced at him over his shoulder. “Do you spar?”

Shiro raised an eyebrow.

“…As in I smack you with a glove and you smack me and then we shoot at each other?”

Keith gave him a deadpan look.

“That’s a duel.”

“Oh. Then no.”

“…Okay then, do you duel?”

“Not since I lost my smacking gloves,” Shiro said with as much gravitas as he could muster. It did earn him a little smile, although Keith rolled his eyes so hard Shiro was afraid he was going to hurt himself.

“Your sense of humor is kind of a surprise.”

“What, that I have one? I get told that a lot.”

“No. That it’s so…” Keith paused, searching for the right word. “…Dorky.”

Shiro headed down the corridor towards the gym. Sounded like that would be his best bet for keeping Keith relaxed.

“I am on the special projects track, which officially makes me a dork. But you are too so I wouldn’t get too smug.”

“Yeah but I chose it at random without knowing its associations. Although I guess—why are you in special projects?”

“Track.”

“What?”

“Special projects track. I’m not graduated yet.”

“Oh. Okay. So why are you there.”

Shiro frowned and fell silent for a bit, not sure how comfortable he was sharing his entire sordid professional career with a near-stranger. Maybe just. Skip the details.

“I had some issues with the administration a couple years back, so I left the Garrison for a bit and got my basic pilot’s license elsewhere. But flying without… purpose, without direction. That didn’t really suit me. Coming back wasn’t exactly my choice, but I did so on the condition that they’d let me try for special projects.”

He frowned and rubbed at his neck, not sure why he was telling Keith all of this. “I want to do the unknown,” he said carefully. “And I’ve looked… so many places for that kind of adventure and promise and found all of them… lacking. In a word. And here’s not much better—everyone’s under so much pressure constantly the whole complex feels like a soda can that’s been tossed in a cement mixer for a few decades. But it is better than what I had. And it is… it has been home for me. And if I can’t explore, if I can’t have that… that physical sensation of moving from one plane of experience to the next, then I at least want to be around other people who want that just as badly as I do.”

He laughed awkwardly and gave Keith a sheepish smile.

“It’s comforting being around other losers who are drawn to this place. Is all I should have said.”

Shiro waited for the mocking. For the questions about what “issues” he could have had. Keith was staring solemnly up at him, and Shiro waited. He hated this part. The silence between ripping open a little window into synaptic firings in his brain, linking them together into something fit for human consumption and offering them to another person. 

And Keith really had issues with staring at people. And forgetting to blink. How was he not constantly using eye drops.

Keith suddenly shook his head as though trying to wake himself up. His steps quickened.

“…That’s really pretty.”

Shiro barely caught the words.

He jogged a few steps to catch up with Keith.

“Sorry?”

Keith was scowling again, his cheeks red.

“I said—…I said it was. Pretty,” he muttered. “Your sentiments, I mean. I like them. By the way, having to clarify myself like this? Absolute torture. In case you were wondering.”

Shiro cleared his throat, his whole face suddenly aflame.

“I, uh… I wasn’t really going for pretty. Or trying to torture you, but. Thank you?”

“What were you going for, then.”

“…Brutal honesty. I guess.”

Keith gave him an unimpressed look and then rolled his shoulders.

“If that was your idea of brutal then I almost don’t want to spar with you.”

Shiro snorted and before he could really filter himself or remember that he was talking to someone he’d had a conversational relationship with for less than twenty four hours, said, “Masochistic streak you’re worried will be left unfulfilled?”

Keith’s expression hardened. For a moment Shiro worried that the other cadet was going to leave like he had the day before in the canteen. But then he let out a puff of air that somewhat resembled a laugh and said, “No. But I would feel badly pinning someone whose idea of brutal honesty so closely resembles a therapy haiku project.”

“What if I only attack in prime-number syllable groups. Would that help?” 

“Okay I. I honestly don’t know enough about poetry or whatever to be uh. Witty about this. Anymore.” Keith tilted his head to the side. Shiro could feel him staring again.

“Will you spar with me, though? You never answered.”

Shiro faltered, the intensity of the question catching him off guard.

“That… depends. I guess,” he said slowly. “Is it something you like to do for fun? Or… what.”

Keith started to nod but then paused. His brows furrowed.

“’Like to do’ isn’t. Quite right,” he said finally. “‘Need to do’ would be closer.”

He rolled his shoulders again and rubbed his arm.

“My limbs feel, like. Itchy. Sometimes. I don’t know how else to describe it. But they have to move. They… want? To move. And the kind of movement that makes them calmest is fighting.”

A worried look crossed Keith’s features. It brought a softness to the nervous energy rolling off of him in waves.

“But I don’t—I hate hurting people. Just—just to clarify. I don’t want you to think I’m—…I’m not some sort of violent. Freak.” He glanced up at Shiro. His eyes were solemn.

“You get it. Right?”

A face flashed before Shiro’s eyes. 

His own, years ago. Years stupider and younger. Black hair and dark eyes. One of them swelling shut. Blood dripping down his lips, staining his bared teeth. Middle school fights that had been impossible for Shiro to avoid, shuttled off to a military academy where half the students there had parents who were under his mother’s command. Deaths happened under his mother’s command. The price of exploration and frontiers. Kids heard a name, heard adults talking and made the connections themselves. Mostly they yelled. Cried. Sometimes they wanted a real fight.

Jack had been the last one brave enough. A dead brother the impetus. 

Shiro had won. Barely. Still had a scar on his bottom lip from a lucky punch. He’d hid in his bunk, called his grandmother and sobbed incoherently to her from the pain and the fear, the guilt that swallowed him.

His grandmother had pulled him out of school the next day. Stoically endured a terse three-hour-long video call with her irate daughter-in-law. Shiro was placed in the local public school, where everyone knew him as that kid who was decent at rock climbing and better at volleyball and whose grandmother ran the snack shop for tourists in the summer and tutoring center for the locals during the winter.

But the memory of blooded teeth remained a masochistic pull. Even years later. 

Shiro shook his head to clear it and kicked away his morose ruminating impulses. Keith was still staring up at him, but his expression was now pinched with anxiety.

“I get it,” Shiro said, as reassuringly as he could. He gave the other cadet a weary grin. “Just don’t go picking fights here. You get that urge, you come find me. Or—uh.” He felt his cheeks go red. “Someone else to spar with. Sorry. Shouldn’t have presumed—we haven’t even—I don’t know if we’d even be a good. Match. Or whatever. Spar-wise. I’m more used to just beating the snot out of a punching bag. And I mean you’re roughly the size of a punching bag but that doesn’t necessarily—”

“Sorry?”

Keith’s annoyed tone cut off Shiro’s rambling. Shiro glanced nervously at him.

“Yeah?”

Keith no longer looked nervous. He’d crossed his arms. Which looked ridiculous as he stormed down the hall in his orange and white cadet uniform.

“In what way am I ‘roughly the size of a punching bag.’”

Shiro cast his mind around for some sort of coherent answer.

“Diameter-ly?”

Keith stared at him for a long moment and then looked away.

“I don’t think it’s really fair to make up words so you can get out of answering seriously,” he muttered. The lack of malice in his voice made Shiro relax. A hair.

“I’m not used to babbling incoherently when I have an audience. I wasn’t expecting to be held accountable for my inanity.”

They reached the side gym doors. Shiro’s preferred training area. It was by the library which meant that it was most frequented by the most studious. And they rarely left the library before dark, so the gym was usually all but empty. 

Keith was standing in front of the ID lock. He stared at it quizzically and the glanced up at Shiro.

“Why’s it not doing the ‘whoosh’ opening thing. I thought this place was all future fancy.”

Shiro pointed to his ID band. Keith’s nose scrunched up.

“Oh. So that’s important?”

“…Kind of, yeah. Do you not have yours on?”

Keith shook his head and held up his wrist. No band.

“Left it in my room,” he explained. His ears went red again. “I thought it might have a tracker or something in it so I. Uh. Dismantled? It.”

“…What?”

“It’s in a lot of pieces and I don’t know how to put it back together? I kind of thought ‘dismantled’ implied that.”

“You thought it might have a tracker in it,” Shiro repeated. He furrowed his brow, suddenly curious. “Did you find one?”

Keith cleared his throat, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling.

“There was a lot of, uh. Gadgetry. In there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Any of that ‘gadgetry’ a tracker?”

“…When I said ‘dismantled.’ That. Might not have been the most accurate verb.”

“Okay. Do you want to try throwing the verbal dart a little closer to the target, then?”

Keith gnawed on the inside of his cheek, thinking.

“Pulverized?”

“Hoo boy…”

Shiro pressed his own brace against the ID pad. The doors slid open. Future fancy.

The side gym was smaller than the main one on the complex, and the equipment was all a bit on the old side. Some of it stained with grease in places. The stuffing was starting to come out of Shiro’s favorite bench. A few cadets were on the machines in the corner, talking with one another as they did reps. None of them looked their way as the doors opened.

Shiro headed over to the lockers and shoved his bag inside.

“You’re going to have to go to the administration and request a new one,” he told Keith, who was now trailing behind him, eyeing the equipment. “You need them to get into restricted areas and to log sim hours and spec cards. Stuff like that.”

“My roommate kept talking about specs. What is that?” Keith asked. He shrugged off his cadet jacket and reached past Shiro to stuff it in the same locker. Shiro had to lean out of the way and quickly turned around when it became apparent that Keith was just. Going to change. Right there.

“There’s other lockers if you—never mind. Specs are physical specification examinations. We have to meet baseline requirements to be eligible for special projects.”

“Oh. So we’re competing against some random numbers, not each other.” Keith tossed his uniform shoes in the locker and then bent down to rummage around in his bag. 

“Right,” Shiro said. He moved just a hair to try and give Keith a bit of privacy from the rest of the gym as Keith tugged off his pants and threw them into the locker as well. At least he had a pair of sweatpants ready. Shiro stared up at the ceiling, hoping that was the sociably acceptable place to look when someone you barely knew began stripping in front of you. Seemed about right.

“Do you have any issue beating those numbers?”

More rustling noises. Shiro risked a glance down and saw Keith yank on a T-shirt and then sit down on the floor to tug on a pair of ratty trainers. The conversation across the gym had slowed and the cadets were looking at them curiously. There was some obnoxious tittering.

“No—yes. No? Sometimes,” Shiro said quickly. Secondhand embarrassment on behalf of Keith the happily oblivious making him want to melt. 

Keith pushed himself to his feet. His head cocked to the side.

“Which is it. Yes or no.”

“It’s sometimes,” Shiro said. He grabbed his gym clothes out of his bag and closed the locker. “I’m going to go get changed, if you want to wait—”

“Go where?”

Shiro hesitated and then pointed to the other side of the gym, where a small door marked “changing rooms” was nestled between two machines. Keith’s face turned scarlet. 

“Oh. Uh. Whoops. I guess.”

Shiro heard a few more snorts from across the gym. He turned to frown at the cadets and all five quickly went back to their workouts. He turned to face Keith again, his brows furrowed in apology.

“Sorry…I should have pointed it out sooner but you—you change really fast.”

“Yeah growing up sharing a room will do that.” Keith ran his fingers through his hair in agitation. It fluffed up even more. “Not sure if I’ve mentioned this already but I really hate feeling stupid.”

“You have,” Shiro said quietly. “Once or twice.”

He fiddled with his T-shirt for a moment and then with a little burst of sympathetic irritation he tugged off his own uniform top and started to get changed. He could feel Keith staring at him. When he looked the other cadets fingers were still buried in his hair, but there was a puzzled expression on his red face. Shiro pulled his T-shirt on and then asked politely, “Yes?”

“There’s a changing room. There.” Keith pointed with the hand that wasn’t tangled in his hair. “Did you forget. Does passing on that information erase it from your own brain.”

“Yeah, it’s an unfortunate side-effect of wearing the ID band. Door locations spontaneously disappear from my consciousness the moment I take my eyes off of them.” Shiro closed his locker and bent down to finish tying his shoes. The other cadets were staying silent. Good.

“...So I was right to pulverize it.”

“Dismantle,” Shiro corrected, a burst of smug satisfaction making his cheeks heat up when Keith laughed. Still breathy, untrained and weak. But honest.

He liked honest.

Shiro pushed himself to his feet and gave Keith a little smile. “That’s the verb we’re going to use when we tell Ames in administration about your intellectual curiosity and how it compelled you to systematically and carefully dissect your ID band when we go ask him for another one. But no, I didn’t forget about the changing room. This way’s just faster.” He gestured for Keith to follow him over towards the mat area. “Besides, it’s not like we don’t see each other in various states of undress during specs anyway. And who the hell designs a gym where the lockers aren’t in the changing room—”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Keith said, a note of exasperation in his voice. “I see what you’re doing. You’re bad at being subtle.”

“But good at making you feel less stupid by making even stupider, obvious observations?” Shiro said hopefully

Keith frowned. His eyes narrowed.

“…Yeah,” he said. He didn’t sound too happy about it.

Shiro paused in front of the mat and turned to look at Keith.

“Are you wanting me to mock you?”

Keith snorted and pushed past Shiro to step cautiously onto the mat. He bounced once or twice and then nodded as though satisfied.

“No. Who likes being made fun of.”

“Me, in my moments of masochistic indulgence,” Shiro said. He stepped onto the mat as well. “Sometimes it’s nice to make people laugh by acting like an idiot. If I like the people well enough.”

Keith gave him a sideways look. It wasn’t impressed.

“…Aren’t you supposed to be some hot shot or something.”

Shiro paused in his stretching, bemused.

“No? I’m just a special projects hopeful.”

“My roommate knows who you are.” Keith crossed his arms over his chest again. “They talked a lot about how you’re a genius. Apparently.”

Shiro’s stomach churned. Great. Legacy rumors always got around fast.

He sat down to continue stretching, trying to keep from feeling irritated. Or hunted. One of the two. He knew he should have changed his name… all of the first years would probably be by to bother him at some point.

“I’d say you know me slightly better than your roommate. Do I seem like a genius?” he said dryly.

Keith plopped down on the mat across from him. His long legs splayed out.

“No,” he said bluntly. “You admitted to making yourself into a slapstick prop for cheap laughs.” He pointed to Shiro’s chest. “And your shirt is on both inside-out and backwards.”

Shiro glanced down reflexively, but his shirt… seemed to be on correctly. He gave Keith a puzzled look, and a little smirk tugged at the other cadet’s lips.

“Gullible genius. I’ll have to let my roommate know.”

“Wh—hey!”

Keith snickered quietly, hiding his laugh behind his hand. Shiro scowled and went back to stretching, annoyed with himself for falling for the obvious bait. And even more annoyed that he was letting this… stranger treat him like an old friend. Normally people had to earn that with him. Probably why he had no friends.

He started when Keith’s foot nudged his own.

“Are you done with that.”

“Do I look done?”

Keith grumbled something that smacked of impatience but said nothing further. Every so often his foot would bump against Shiro’s until finally Shiro grew annoyed enough to say, “You can stretch too, you know.”

“I don’t know how. Can you go even a little faster.”

Keith’s fingers were drumming against the mat in a rapid staccato. Shiro could hear Keith’s breathing catch. Uneven and restless.

The sensation was contagious—every stretch, every movement that wasn’t laced with adrenaline felt like moving in slow motion to Shiro. He tried to ignore Keith, the bobbing of his throat as he swallowed, the dark blade of his pupils swallowing up what little color remained in his eyes. It set Shiro’s teeth on edge. Felt too much like yesterday’s wild. Whatever Keith was when he wasn’t wearing the orange and white cadet uniform that muscled him into propriety.

Shiro reached his breaking point.

He pushed himself to his feet, unsurprised to see his arms prickled with goosebumps. Keith sprang up immediately, his long limbs moving with an unnatural fluidity. He was balanced on the balls of his feet. Weight distributed as though he were ready to lunge forward. 

Despite himself, Shiro took an instinctive step back, Muscles tensing.

“This isn’t a fight, you know,” he felt the need to point out. “Garrison cadets don’t fight.”

Keith blinked. Some of the color returned to his eyes.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah—yeah I know. I don’t want to fight you.”

“Really.”

Keith bristled and Shiro regretted his tone. It was like disturbing an angry housecat.

“You don’t believe me either. I said I don’t want to fight. It’s sparring. I know the difference.”

Shiro said nothing but silently logged the “either” away for future reference. His warning had gotten through to Keith, at any rate. He didn’t seem as eager. And Shiro felt his own chances of escaping without moderate bodily harm increase tenfold.

“I believe you,” he said at last, as he stepped back into the standard Garrison stance. “But something tells me your instincts and you don’t always agree about what you want.”

A little frown tugged at Keith’s lips, but Shiro saw him brush the comment aside. Just as well. Saying it had made him feel like a hypocri—

Shiro let out a startled (and entirely involuntary) yell as Keith’s foot connected with his forearm. He’d barely managed to block the kick. He quickly dodged another blow—a sidekick aimed at his ribs—before going on the offensive. Two quick jabs. Keith dodged them easily and Shiro felt a jolt of relief and irritation. He was fast. Really fast and—

A quick, painful pressure against his Achilles and with a heavy thud Shiro landed on his back, the air knocked out of him. He stared up at the ceiling. Leg sweep, less than two seconds in. Slightly embarrassing for him.

Keith’s face hovered into view. Pinched with concern.

“You’re heavy,” he said. “I think I hurt my foot.”

“What emotion are you wanting me to feel, here,” Shiro managed to say as he forced air into his lungs.

“Uh. Chagrin. That’s usually how I feel when I’m taken down.”

Keith offered him a hand, and after a moment Shiro took it. Keith had to take a step back and brace himself to help Shiro up, which did make him feel… marginally better.

Shiro dusted himself off and cracked his neck before falling into position again. Made a mental note to jump next time.

Keith stared at him, looking lost.

“What are you doing.”

Shiro lowered his hands a hair.

“Sparring you?” He frowned, suddenly concerned. “Did you really hurt your foot?”

“What. No. Yes, I mean. Still? I mean again? You don’t want to quit?”

It took Shiro a moment to pick through the monosyllables. He gave Keith a puzzled smile.

“I normally don’t like to stop sparring when embarrassment’s all I’ve had the chance to experience. Is that okay? We can call it a day if you’re really hurt.”

Comprehension dawned slowly and brilliantly. Keith’s face lit up, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, lips pressed together to suppress what Shiro had to assume would have otherwise been an explosion of a smile. He fell back, and his posture shifted again, taking on an eerily natural stance. Alien to the careful, affected posture of Garrison training.

“I’m fine. Again?”

Shiro nodded, his embarrassment bleeding away as that infectious energy took hold once more. Piece by piece, pixels deleted from his vision. Bits of the gym fell out of perception. The rusting equipment. Voices of the other cadets. The lockers, the future-fancy door, glass windows and the prying fingers of the desert wind clawing at their frames. Blurs of movement swallowed his vision. His own ragged breath drowned out the scrape of his trainers against the mat. Heavy thuds at points of contact.

They went a few rounds. All ending in stalemates, retreating back to the edge of the mat to reassess opponents. 

Shiro wiped a bead of sweat out of his eyes as they took a silent breather. Keith was fast—agile was the better word for it, probably. He got most of his power from his legs. He might have been a track star in high school. Hurdles, maybe. High jump. Shiro made a mental note to ask before a little twitch in Keith’s expression made Shiro put up his hands again. Barely in time.

The attacks were rapid. But they were light. Haphazard, lacking the kind of precision of that first strike to his leg. After a few more rounds, Shiro gave up blocking half of them, focusing instead on watching. Keith landed a blow on his hip—a swift kick that Shiro wouldn’t have been able to dodge even if he’d tried. He stumbled, managing to catch his footing, but Keith was already closing in again. Too eager, left his right side open.

With a burst of force Shiro lunged forward. He grabbed Keith’s arm, slamming his side into Keith’s chest so he could fling the smaller cadet over his shoulder. Keith landed heavily on his back, the air leaving his lungs in an audible rush. Shiro was unsurprised when Keith immediately tried to scramble to his feet, but Shiro was already on him, forearm pressed against his chest, knee against one shoulder, hand pinning his other arm. They were both breathing heavily, interspersed with curses (from Keith) and little grunts of pain (from Shiro) whenever Keith’s knees made contact with his spine. Which was a bit too frequently for Shiro’s tastes.

He made a frustrated noise and rested more of his weight on Keith’s chest.

“Quit kneeing—ow! I pinned you!”

“I can still move, it isn’t a pin,” Keith shot back. Shiro could hear Keith’s shoes scrambling for purchase as the cadet tried to push himself up. Shiro rested more weight on Keith’s arm. It had to hurt, but Keith continued to struggle.

“Look, it’s a clear win for me. You can either accept that or—fuck!”

Shiro jumped backwards, nursing his right forearm, which was peppered with shallow impressions of Keith’s canines. He stared at the little pockmarks in disbelief. 

“You bit me!”

“You did a shit job of pinning me!”

“You bit me twice?!”

“You didn’t seem to notice the first time!”

Keith had scrambled to his feet as well and was standing as far away from Shiro as the mat would allow. He looked too poshly annoyed for someone who had just gnawed his way out of a regulation wrestling hold.

Shiro stared at the other cadet, his temper threatening to spike. It was a stupid thing to get angry about. He should have anticipated that when Keith said “spar,” he didn’t mean “structured workout with little to no chance of being masticated by your opponent.” Because why would he. Everything about him was an unregulated jumble of reactions. Why should the way he sparred be any different.

“I noticed,” Shiro said finally. “That’s what all the yelling was about.”

Keith had the decency to look embarrassed. He worried at his lip and then muttered, “I assumed those were kick-induced yells.”

“Yeah, well. It was a little of both.” Shiro made a frustrated noise and shook his head, trying to dislodge the irritation still clawing at his throat. He really. Really wanted to go be alone. But a few rounds that had barely lasted fifteen minutes wasn’t sparring. Not in his definition, at least. And he had the feeling that Keith was the type to run himself into the ground before he considered anything done.

He took up his stance again, but not before saying firmly, “We’re going to establish ground rules as we go.”

Keith glanced at him through his fringe. Calculating.

Slowly he fell back, fists raised.

“What kind of rules.”

Shiro made an experimental jab. Keith easily dodged, but unlike before, didn’t immediately go on the offensive. His shoulders did twitch, though. Abandoned movements. Fighting instinct.

“The kind of rules that say no biting.”

Shiro punched again, and this time Keith responded. Painfully slowly. Like he was kicking through a vat of syrup or auditioning for a bit in an action movie filmed entirely in slow motion. Keith’s brows were furrowed in concentration.

“What if that’s the only option?”

“You had another option.”

“What, giving up?”

Keith’s next punch was a bit more aggressive. Shiro heard him curse under his breath, a creative mixture of expletives and self-admonishments. Shiro blocked and responded with two more punches. One dodged, the other hit. A light blow to Keith’s shoulder. He barely stumbled.

“Tactical surrender is always an option. Not always the best, but—”

Shiro paused to block another kick. Harder this time. Keith was getting frustrated.

“There’s nothing tactical about quitting!”

“Yes there is—there has to be or every sparring session would end with someone getting their jaw broken!”

“That’s just called losing! Using bigger words doesn’t change what it is!”

Shiro saw the blow coming but couldn’t block it in time. Keith’s foot slammed into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him again. He stumbled backwards but Keith didn’t give him time to recover. Two more quick blows, one to his shoulder and the other—fittingly—to his jaw sent him tumbling back. He landed heavily, and this time Keith didn’t jump back. He pinned him, a mirror of how Shiro had him a few moments before. Shiro struggled to catch his breath, staring up at the other cadet’s dark eyes. They were wide with anger. Its origin a complete mystery.

Keith’s weight was resting nearly all on Shiro’s collarbone. Slipping closer to his throat. Shiro managed to suck in a lungful of air at last and choked out, “I give.”

Keith’s glower intensified.

“What.”

“You win. I surrender.” Shiro wrapped his hand around Keith’s wrist, relieving some of the pressure on his throat. Keith fought back. Halfhearted and short-lived. A second later he sat back on his heels. Frustration rolling off of him in waves, making the air thick with resentment. Explosive.

Shiro carefully pushed himself up, ignoring Keith for the time being as he checked to make sure his jaw wasn’t actually broken. It cracked when he moved it side to side. Probably not the best sign. But it didn’t hurt too much. Shockingly. 

“I didn’t actually break your jaw.”

The terse exacerbated the headache gnawing at Shiro’s brain folds. He thought longingly of aspirin.

“The thank you card is in the mail,” Shiro said. He stood up carefully, dusting himself off. “Surprised you let me escape with only a mild concussion, considering what a loser I am.”

“You’re not a loser!”

Keith had scrambled to his feet as well. His hands clenched into fists at his side.

“You’re not a loser,” he repeated. More vehemently.

Shiro rubbed at his jaw and warily eyed the other cadet.

“I lost. I’m not being hard on myself, I’m just—”

“You could have thrown me off, easily,” Keith interrupted. He took a step forward. “You barely had to try and you pushed my arm away. Why didn’t you throw me? Why didn’t you keep fighting?!”

“Why didn’t you knock me unconscious when you realized I could still fight back?” Shiro countered. He didn’t wait for Keith to respond. He took a step towards the other cadet, who was looking cornered. “This isn’t life-and-death—this is supposed to be a bonding exercise. It’s supposed to be—it’s fucking exercise! It’s one level shy of step aerobics! It’s why we pull our punches, and—”

“That’s not how fights happen in the real world! People don’t pull their punches—they don’t stop with broken jaws!”

“You said it yourself, you don’t want to fight. So which is it?”

Keith made an aggravated noise and pressed his hand against his face. He fell quiet. Every so often his fingers would twitch.

Shiro waited as patiently as he could. Which his throbbing jaw and incoming migraine dictated clock in at about ten seconds.

“Keith—”

“Don’t talk to me right now. I’m trying to work through something.”

Shiro bit back his annoyance. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“…Do you want me to go, or—”

“No. Stay. You’d distract me if you left. And your presence is kind of helpful.”

Shiro didn’t have the energy to ask how, exactly. He remained where he was, his spikes in temper slowly bleeding away as he realized he was too tired to be annoyed. And he was cold. Sweat drying too fast. And—…

The gym machines surrounding the mats were empty. They’d lost their audience at some point. 

Shiro frowned and cast his mind back.

Some… ancient point. He couldn’t remember hearing the voices stop. Or the gym door opening and closing.

He glanced up at the skylights. Oranges and reds.

His sudden and complete exhaustion made sense.

Keith still had his hand over his face, but Shiro took the risk. He lightly tapped the back of Keith’s hand. Was unsurprised when the cadet growled.

“I said don’t talk—”

“I think the dinner bell’s going to ring soon.”

That made Keith react. He immediately looked up at the skylights, his eyes widening.

“…I hope that’s sunset, not sunrise.”

“Honestly? Your guess is as good as mine.”

“How long were we—”

“Probably a good five hours, at least.”

Keith ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. He looked wrung out.

“Holy shit.”

“Seconded.”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck and risked a glance at Keith. He was still staring up at the skylights, pensive. Even though his limbs were visibly shaking from exhaustion.

“…Did you figure it out?” Shiro asked hesitantly.

Keith’s eyes slowly met his own.

“What.”

“Whatever it was you needed the quiet for.”

“Oh.”

Keith lowered his hand. 

“Halfway. Maybe a little less, but.”

He let out a slow breath and then turned to face Shiro. Squared his shoulders.

“You were right. I don’t want to fight you. This isn’t—it’s not real. And I don’t want it to be. That’s—when it’s real, with stuff like this? It isn’t a game. You don’t get to have the luxury of winners and losers. So if you’re still—if I haven’t… scared you off with how, um. Intense. Or whatever. I get. Then we can make rules. And have winners and… and losers. Without, uh. Excessive. Injury.”

Shiro listened to the halting speech, wondering, not for the first time, just how often Keith had clawed his way victorious out of the real thing. Often enough to understand that victory didn’t mean a win. Just meant the luxury of licking your wounds. Spare energy to glue things back together.

Shiro rubbed his jaw. The ache had subsided. Enough for him to be able to quirk a grin at Keith without grimacing.

“You did scare me, you know.”

Keith looked dismayed. He crumpled in on himself, eyes downcast. Face pale.

“Oh. I guess that’s. Not surprising.”

“No—no, not when we were sparring!” Shiro said quickly, in a bit of a panic. “Yesterday. When I first met you.”

He saw Keith frown, eyebrow scrunching as he thought. He glanced up at Shiro through his mess of sweat-soaked fringe.

“…Yesterday? In, uh. In the. Bathroom?”

“Yes. No! No—not just then.” Shiro tugged at his hair. Fucking honest streak. Matt was right, he needed to learn when to lie better.

Keith made a little noise of understanding.

“…In the hallway? After… um. Ursula. Yelled at me?”

“Captain Urma. And no, just—forget I said anything. I said it in the past tense and… and I meant it.” Shiro crumpled up an invisible piece of paper and tossed it aside. “There, okay? Fear disposed of.”

Keith stared at him blankly for a long while. Then the corners of his mouth twitched.

“…You littered.”

“My fear is biodegradable.”

“You’re a littering dork.”

“What’s with all the name calling? I’m starting to suspect you want to hear me call myself a loser again.”

“What—no! I didn’t enjoy that. Mostly because it was a lie. Shiro.” Keith said the name like a test, and seemed pleased when it was met with no correction.

Shiro hummed noncommittally and made his way over to the lockers. Keith followed him.

“It was!” The other cadet was starting to sound annoyed. “Rule number one should be you aren’t allowed to call yourself a loser if winning was still easily possible.”

“What should that particular situation be called, then?” Shiro asked as he grabbed his uniform out of his locker. “And I’m gonna hit the showers before dinner. Hopefully.”

“We could call it a check? Like in chess?” Keith offered. He frowned. “I don’t know how you’d… noun-ify that, though. Check…er? I’m a checker. No, that’s… that’s dumb…”

“You play chess?”

“What? No.”

“Oh.”

“Do you?”

“I…uh.”

Shiro cleared his throat and slung his bag over his shoulder.

“So, showers?”

“…Okay.” 

Keith closed his locker, still staring at Shiro. 

“…Do you play chess?”

“It’s not important.”

“If it’s not important then answer the question.”

“I have played a couple.”

“…A couple what. Times?”

“More, uh. Tournaments.”

“What.”

“And I was a member—”

“What.”

“—of the chess club in high school—”

“But you’re so—uh.”

Shiro glanced at Keith as they walked through the door. The other cadet’s face was also bright red. And he was looking anywhere but at Shiro. Shiro waited a moment and then lightly hit Keith’s shoulder with his bag.

“I’m so what.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“If it doesn’t matter then answer the question.”

“I hate this.”

Shiro laughed, the noise pinging lightly against the garrison halls. When he saw Keith scowl he quickly suppressed what few embarrassing guffaws were waiting to be released and said, “I’m not laughing at you! To clarify.”

“I know.”

Keith’s scowl worsened. His fingers were gripping his bag so tightly his knuckles had turned white.

“I was going to say that you don’t. Seem like a chess nerd,” Keith said slowly. Every word sounded like it had been carefully examined and inspected before being allowed to escape.

“Huh. …Thank you?” Shiro said, confused. “I was, though. Am, I should say. Which I shouldn’t—you’ve, uh. Already called me a ‘dork’ twice, just to sort of. Jog your memory.”

“They’re different.” Keith’s eyes darted up to fix on Shiro’s face for a moment before looking away again. His ears red. “You are a dork. But nerd is—you’re not scrawny enough. Or whatever. To be a nerd. You’re too—…ugh. No.”

Keith picked up his pace.

“I’m going on ahead.”

“Wh—Keith, we’re heading in the same direction,” Shiro said to Keith’s retreating back. “We live across from each other?”

“I know! I’m just—I’ll see you in the shower. No—no! The bathroom—dinner! I’ll see you at dinner bye.”

With that Keith sprinted down the hall and turned the corner. The wrong corner. Shiro started to call after him but reasoned that there was no way Keith would be able to hear him anyway. And he doubted Keith would want him to chase after him. And honestly he didn’t have the energy. How Keith had managed an all-out sprint was beyond him.

Shiro was waylaid by several of his instructors on his way back to the dorms. It was a good ten minutes before he managed to escape (with promises to help run sims intros for the first years after finals were done), and by the time he got to the showers they were almost all full. He had to take the one second from the end. Icy-Hot, as it had been affectionately dubbed.

Shiro braced himself for the inevitable first degree burns.

He managed to withstand the temperamental shower long enough to rinse the shampoo out of his hair and quickly scrub the sweat off, but finally with a loud string of curses he hopped out of the (suddenly frigid) spray.

“Not worth it,” he muttered as he tugged on his rec clothes. “Next time I’ll just bathe in the sink—”

“Shirogane?”

A pair of shower shoes appeared on the other side of the curtain. 

“Shirogane is that you. Are you talking to the shower.”

“Keith?”

“Yeah. Who else.”

A pause.

“Oh right. You probably know other people.”

“Yeah I do—hang on.”

Shiro yanked on his T-shirt and managed to get his shower shoes back on without tripping over them and smashing his face into the divider. Not that. That had ever happened to him.

He pulled the curtain open. Keith was leaning against the bathroom wall, looking thoroughly unimpressed. His hair was soaking wet and beads of water were dripping into his eyes. He lifted a hand in greeting and then immediately sneezed. 

“Ugh. Why do they have to keep it so cold in here when the showers are already cold,” he muttered.

“You don’t wait for them to heat up?” Shiro said in surprise. 

Keith blinked.

“They heat up?”

“Yeah—well. Kind of. You have to wait—…I keep forgetting you didn’t go through orientation.”

“Nope. Orientationless. Which is becoming more and more obvious the longer I spend here.” Keith tilted his head to the side. “Speaking of which. Dinner. I can sit with you, right. Or would your friend—would. Uh.”

Keith’s expression went blank. Shiro waited a moment and then helpfully provided, “Matt. Is it really that hard to remember?”

“Probably not. So can I sit with you?”

“Sure,” Shiro said, a bit bemused. “You aren’t… tired of me, yet? I won’t be offended or anything if you wanted to eat with your roommate or something.”

“Who? Oh. No.” Keith plucked at the hem of his T-shirt. “They’re neurotic. Being around them stresses me out.” He gave Shiro an odd look. “Do people get tired of you quickly or something.”

“Not historically but there’s a first time for everything. People don’t usually spend all day sparring with me either, though, so.” Shiro frowned, a pool of unease spreading in his gut. He glanced at Keith, not quite sure how to ask without sounding. Unstuck in normal cognition.

“So… did. Uh. That seem weird to you?”

Keith glanced around the bathroom and then back to Shiro, his eyebrows furrowed.

“No? I mean… we do talk in the bathroom more than average. I guess.”

“No, not—…fair point.”

Shiro grabbed his things and gestured for Keith to follow him. Once they were out of the bathroom—and hovering in the hallway, which honestly wasn’t much better—Shiro stopped and turned to face Keith again. 

“I’m talking about our sparring session,” he said. “Did it seem odd to you?”

Keith crossed his arms over his chest (impressive considering he was still holding two bottles of shampoo and shower gel) and then said slowly, “I… guess I gave a few more impassioned speeches than I usually do. But nothing I’d call, uh. Odd. Or whatever.”

“But we were there all day, apparently,” Shiro said. “And I didn’t—usually I notice those kinds of things.”

“Things like time progressing?”

“Things like cadets who’d been blatantly starring at us for most of our first few rounds leaving. Or yes, if you’re going to be smart about it, the general progression of time. I tend to notice these things having lived in a military academy for a few years where literally every moment of my life has to be registered and accounted for.” Shiro lowered his voice as a few other cadets passed, giving them both strange looks. “Did you even hear the bell for lunch or anything? It’s normally ear-splitting.”

Keith opened his mouth to reply, but then a startled look crossed over his face. He slowly closed his mouth.

“...No,” he said finally. “I don’t remember hearing anything other than you.”

“Oh. Well that’s—that’s. Flattering. Thank you?”

“I didn’t really mean it to be. Just sort of a more. General observation than compliment.”

“…Oh.”

An awkward silence made Shiro acutely aware of just how loudly he was breathing. He tried to think of a way around breathing that didn’t involve holding his breath. Failed. Sadly. Keith was looking equally uncomfortable. His arms were at crossed level two position. Two out of three. Three was, Shiro had to imagine, the point where Keith shoved his hands into his chest to hug his own bleeding ribcage. To what end, Shiro could only grimly speculate.

He cleared his throat. Mostly to banish that particular image from his mind.

“So…”

“I can try and make other—I don’t have to eat dinner with you, or whatever,” Keith interrupted. “I know this isn’t. Pleasant. I can eat by myself or, uh. Make. Friends.”

“No!” Shiro said quickly and then immediately backtracked. “I mean yes, you should. Make friends, I mean. Friends—they’re hard to come by in the special projects track, honestly, so if you can make them, then that’s impressive. And something you should do. To put on your resume if nothing else. My initial outburst was to convey that no, it… it isn’t pleasant. Unpleasant! Which is to say it’s fine. Good, even. I—uh.”

Shiro rubbed the back of his neck and then let out a little puff of air.

“I had fun today. And you don’t have to ask if you can eat dinner with us anymore. Consider this a standing invite.”

He stuck out his hand, half-seriously wondering if Keith would recognize the gesture.

“Takashi Shirogane. Call me Shiro.”

For a long, painful moment, Keith simply stared at him with an inscrutable expression. The only bit that was… scrutable. Didn’t exactly scream positivity. But Shiro remained standing in the hallway, arm outstretched, despite the curious (and sometimes judgey) stares of other cadets as they passed.

And then Keith moved.

Slowly. Almost imperceptible at first. He stretched out his hand. His fingers lightly grazed the inside of Shiro’s wrist before wrapping around his hand.

Pressure. Surprisingly gentle and hopelessly cautious.

His lips pulled up into the ghost of a smile.

“Keith,” he said, and then furrowed his brow. “…Kogane. Pretty sure that’s what I settled on. Keith is fine.”

“Alliteration’s always nice. Makes things easy to remember,” Shiro said politely. Settled on. Interesting verb choice as always. Talking with Keith felt like conversing with a character in a murder mystery dinner theater. Obvious clue-dropping sprinkled in every bit of dialogue. Traitorous butlers may or may not be involved. There was really no way to tell.

Shiro lightly squeezed Keith’s hand and then let go. Keith took a little step backwards, hugging his shower accoutrement to his chest.

“So I should. Probably put this stuff somewhere that isn’t dripping all over the floor,” Keith said, motioning to his bottles.

“Same. I’ll—well I was going to say meet you in the mess hall but you live right across from me so—”

“Walk together? Sure.”

Keith nodded once and then turned and headed into his room without another word. Shiro glanced at the nameplate on the door before turning and heading into his room.

Kogane.

Shiro found himself mentally tracing the letters as he put his things away. Rolling against his tongue, testing them in the air. Over and over, listening for a resonance he worried, hoped would be there. The whole while utterly unsure as to why he felt compelled to do so. To cling to this name.

It wasn’t the first opaque gesture he’d found himself making that day, he reasoned. If he dwelled on every one of them his headache would probably just get worse. Thoughts compartmentalized. Poorly and in shoddy cages, he tried to shrug off the lingering unease.

He tugged his sweats on and headed out into the hall. Keith was leaning against the wall, talking with his roommate. He abandoned conversation the moment his dark eyes rested on Shiro, a small smile lighting up his face. Shiro heard him give some passing excuse to his roommate without looking at them. No he couldn’t do dinner with them, but thanks for the offer. Roommate Alex rolled their eyes and turned to storm down the hall, a bag of books weighing down their shoulders, an envious expression weighing down their lips when they glanced fleetingly back at the two of them. 

Shiro felt a compulsion to apologize. As though it were partially his fault that Keith had dismissed them. He started after Alex. Steps arrested when he heard a hopeful, “Hey, Shiro.”

He couldn’t move. Didn’t want to, in fact. Years of his grandmother, his mother fixing in him rules of proper conduct. Gone in two words. Compulsory apology reconfigured to later, scheduled reconciliation. More easily than he’d ever dismissed anything in his life.

It was disturbingly fettering for something that should have been freeing. 

He glanced down at Keith. The shock of his dark hair, glowing blues and purples in the garish hallway lights. The smattering of freckles—so light they were almost invisible—dashed across the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones. 

Shiro couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop himself from lightly chiding Keith, “Don’t be a dick to your roommate,” half serious, half teasing. Knowing somehow that Keith would hear both tones in his voice. Trusting that he would apologize later, reading it in Keith’s exasperated click of his tongue, the familiar nasal way his voice got when he was being a brat as he said, “I wasn’t being a dick, I was being expedient. Why should you have to wait just because I was talking with someone.”

Shiro felt himself roll his eyes. Laugh at Keith’s kind rudeness, oddly important to him. This practical stranger’s brashness. Awkward grace, jumble of contradictions that made him fleshed out and starkly real.

It was the same eerie naturalness that possessed Keith’s posture in the gym. The misplaced ease that Shiro had felt seep into his own tissues, twisting his words, his actions and compulsions. Not parallel or perpendicular to how things should be. Just slightly off. A few degrees from how things were, how they’d been, how he’d, been. Minus Keith. Two outlines framing two translucent paths, offering him a choice between options whose consequences, whose motivations were totally unfathomable to him.

Shiro blinked the double vision from his eyes, his heart rate picking up for no reason he could understand. They’d stopped talking at some point, their footfalls almost perfectly in sync. Their eyes caught, and in Keith’s expression, just for a moment, a fleeting, empty moment, Shiro read uncertainty there too. Steely wariness, hard and distant and terrified before it was snuffed out by a blink.

And things were normal again. Uneven footfalls. Awkward banter that slowly melded into more natural conversation. Affectations dropping off of them one by one like damaged hull plating. Denting the ground behind them.

And things were normal too as they stood in line, grabbed their dinners. Shiro gently shoving cans off of Keith’s tray and threatening him with kale, Keith pointing out the identical nutritional components and what did taste matter it all turned to shit in the end. 

The banality of it all, comforting in its unfamiliarity, in its proper strangerness. In its little gestures towards knowing, and not the terrifying leap of matched steps, familiar names, and comforting silences.

Slowly, temporarily, Shiro’s heart rate calmed.

-x-

Shiro tapped his stylus against the scan sheet. Rain was pelting against the windows again. It drowned out the sighs, the shifting chairs, the nervous creaking of bones as cadets cast furtive glances at the large clock at the front of the room. Counting down.

Matt had left the exam room already. He’d flashed Shiro a little peace sign, which made Professor Izaak clear his throat disapprovingly, his watery eyes narrowed under bushy white brows.

The rest of them were stuck there. In the small classroom at the far end of the special projects wing. Last final before the quarter break. There was no guarantee any would move on to special projects. The seats could remain empty until suitable candidates were found. The rest of the Garrison maintained a perpetual agelessness as each quarter new cadets arrived to fill the spaces of the older ones that graduated. But while the rest of the Garrison naturally filtered out the old, special projects cadets aged rapidly. Caught in the hopeful loop that maybe next quarter, maybe next year, while stress, competition, and exhaustion ate away their youth.

Most quit after three years. Or were kicked out for failing to meet the basic requirements at a random spec or final.

Shiro could hear someone in the back row sniffling quietly, even over the rain lashing against the windows. A gentle clunk as a stylus was set down. Shiro twirled his stylus between his fingers as he tried to guess Sniffles’ identity. Clarkson, maybe. Or Kaphi. 

Shiro’s answer sheet was completely filled. He felt reasonably confident in the blackened dots and meticulously-scribed essays. As he always felt when taking a newer course. Something for which there existed no textbook with red scribbles.

He looked over his essay for the third time. Caught another spelling error, but it was trivial. Izaak routinely misspelled things on the board during his haphazard lectures.

For some reason Shiro was killing time.

Normally he would have been in the gym by now with Matt. Training for specs or planning the next outing into town.

Instead he was waiting for some silent cue. Not restless, or even rest-space-less. Just waiting for something that wasn’t the rain against the windows, or Kaphi’s—no, Clarkson’s— silent crying in the back row.

He looked at his answer sheet again. Quadruple checking.

Maybe he was waiting for the inevitable panic attack that always assailed him at the end of finals week. The grim specter that whispered failure in his ear. Annoying that it was always “failure” and never anything useful. Like, “remember to pick up more socks when you’re in town your entire collection is riddled with holes and will soon be classified as a biohazard.” But sadly panic’s vocabulary was limited to the one word. Sometimes in his mother’s voice. More often in his own.

Shiro rubbed his temple and glanced up at the clock.

Five minutes had passed.

His answer sheet was still complete. Still as perfect as it was going to get.

And still he could not make himself move. He was still sitting. Not restless or rest space less. Listening to the rain outside. Pretending to look busy every so often so Izaak’s suspicious gaze wouldn’t linger on him quite so long. 

With a terrible BANG the door to the classroom suddenly burst open. Shiro caught a flash of black hair, heard the soft curse of, “Fucking locks.” When he lifted his head, he saw Keith standing in the door. Eyes trained on him. Keith gave a nearly-imperceptible nod in his direction, and then cleared his throat and said, “Uh. Wrong room.”

Izaak had pushed himself to his paltry height, looking more confused than usual. Which was quite a feat.

“Cadet, you can’t just—”

“Sorry. Wrong room,” Keith repeated. Slower and slightly condescending. Keith gave Shiro another pointed look and then closed the door.

The stylus and answer tablet were in Shiro’s hand before the door latch clicked. He barely remembered to give his normal cursory nod to Izaak—who was still looking frazzled from the sudden and violent interruption—before he bolted out the door.

Keith was waiting out in the hallway, leaning up against a row of lockers. A look of relief crossed over his face, but all he said was a noncommittal, “Hey, Shiro.”

“Hey—so that seemed unnecessary,” Shiro said slowly. “Everything okay?”

“I can’t find my group.”

“Group for…”

“Orientation. Part two or. Three. I don’t know. I knew you had a test today but then I saw M— …I want to say ‘Matt.’”

“Correct.”

“I saw Matt and assumed you would be done too, but he said you were still in the classroom but that I could go get you because you were probably just nitpicking your essay. His guess.”

“So Matt sent you to get me.”

“I sent myself to get you.”

Keith raised an eyebrow.

“Were you?”

Shiro raised an eyebrow back.

“Was I what.”

“Nitpicking your essay.”

Shiro felt his cheeks turn red. Before he could mumble anything to the contrary, a little smirk crossed Keith’s lips, but all he said was an idle, “I see.”

“How is that in any way noteworthy,” Shiro muttered. “And did you need me for something?”

“It’s just a little predictable. That’s all. And I told you, I can’t find my group. And you’re the only person whose name I know, so.”

“And that makes me your only tour guide option?”

“I’d rather keep the number of names I’m expected to remember to a minimum. Not to be rude. I’d just rather put my time elsewhere, I guess.”

Shiro snorted, and when Keith said a defensive, “What,” Shiro just grinned and said, “It’s a little predictable, that’s all.”

Keith had the decency to look flustered.

“I. Guess I deserved that,” he finally mumbled.

“Of course you didn’t, K—… I want to say ‘Keith’?”

“Okay—okay, that’s a little unfair. It’s not like I’m actively trying to forget the name of your forgettable friend.”

“Forgettable. I’ll have to make sure to tell him that next time he gives me grief for double-checking my essays.” Shiro hoisted his bag over his shoulder and gestured for Keith to follow him. “So your group? Any idea where they might be?”

“No.” Keith shoved his hands in his pockets, the scowl on his face darkening with every bump of his bag against his hip. “They said something about. Conference. Room, uh. D. Or P. Is there a P. That can’t be right.”

“They do indeed go up to ‘P.’ To ‘S,’ even.”

“Oh good. Great.”

“So room ‘D’ or ‘P’—wait.” Shiro glanced at his watch and then looked at Keith. “…Orientation starts at noon? That’s not very Garrison.”

“…It probably started earlier,” Keith said. “But I had other things to do so I elected to not remember that information.”

“Other things?”

“Found another gym. Ate some food. Other things.”

“Other things besides the one thing you had to do today…” 

Shiro lightly tapped Keith on the shoulder, and when the other cadet looked at him he asked as tactfully as he could, “Are you avoiding orientation for some reason? Do you not want to meet your classmates? It’s okay to be nervous—”

“I’m not nervous,” Keith interrupted. “Or scared. Or any synonym.” He brushed off Shiro’s hand and took a few steps away, a heavy scowl on his face. “I don’t make a practice of avoiding stuff that makes me nervous—”

“Which you just said you weren’t,” Shiro reminded him.

“—and—yeah I know I’m not nervous, nervous people don’t do anything they just hide in a closet somewhere. You have to sit with what you’re scared of, you have to get over it or you’re worthless.” Keith tugged on the collar of his uniform. “And why do they make these so tight? Is restricted airflow one of the many unnecessary requirements of this place along with ‘cadets must meet approved grooming standards’?!”

“Grooming standards—Keith.”

Shiro started to reach out and touch the cadet’s shoulder again, but thought better of it. That slap had kind of hurt. Brush. Whatever. 

Instead he lightly hit Keith with his bag, and when Keith whirled around to glare at him Shiro just crossed his arms over his chest and said, “If you can sassily quote the rules that means you must have gone to at least part of orientation.”

Keith immediately averted his eyes. Shiro stared at him, unimpressed and slightly annoyed.

“…It’s a really good thing this isn’t a spy school for spies,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“It means you’re not the best at lying.” Shiro sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “But it also means that since my not-spy exams are done, I have room in my ever-dwindling supply of socializing energy to help you before I hibernate until special projects announcements.” 

“…Thanks,” Keith mumbled. He was finally looking properly embarrassed. “…And for the record I didn’t lie. Just kind of. Obfuscated. The truth.”

“All right, Fancywords, just tell me why you ducked out of orientation.”

“It was boring,” Keith said immediately. His lips pulled back in a grimace. “Everyone’s so anxious about grades. What even is the point of grades at this level? Deep space exploration doesn’t care if you got a ‘B’ on asteroid belt navigation. A ‘B’ is still ‘dead.’”

“Some of us enjoy being judged and having an alpha-numerical value assigned to our personal net worth. Or so I hear,” Shiro said. “The crippling neuroticism that’s numerically dependent is also super fun, as you can imagine.”

Keith gave him a bizarre look but then shrugged.

“I don’t think in numbers, I guess. And it was a lot of numbers. And a lot of anxiety about numbers. And Alex was the only other one in special projects track and they were taking notes so I figured no one would miss me if I slipped out. But when I went back everyone must have moved lecture halls or something.”

“So you came and found me.”

“…Technically I found Matt, first.”

Shiro laughed and lightly hit Keith with his bag again.

“You remembered his name!”

“Not on purpose,” Keith muttered. “And stop hitting me. Why’s your bag so heavy?”

“The weight of knowledge.”

Shiro rubbed his hands together, feeling oddly energized. “Okay! Orientation finding. If we sprint I can count it towards the run I was going to take today.”

“You seem pretty. Jazzed—” Keith pronounced the word like it was a new vocabulary item, “—just to help me find a conference room.”

Shiro hummed in thought. “I guess my mood could be classified as ‘vaguely orchestral,’ yeah,” he said finally, “I’m glad to have my finals over with. And I feel like this term I have a real shot at actually getting a spot in projects.”

Keith grunted something noncommittal and started walking down the hall.

“So when you get a spot, you stop being here?” he asked. 

“Not right away,” Shiro said as he fell in step with Keith. “The Garrison does function as a base, after all. Sometimes you’re sent to off sites for specialized training but until you’re assigned to a named mission you still spend most of your time here in R and D or whatever you’re interested in.”

“And what are you interested in.”

Shiro laughed, the noise quickly dying down when he realized Keith was staring at him again, looking irritated.

“Oh, uh—…sorry. I thought it was obvious,” he said.

“We met four days ago,” Keith said. “It’s not.”

“Ah… right.”

Shiro frowned, that little reminder bugged him. Right. There should be awkward bumps between them, still. Skirting. Lots of skirt and avoidance and eggshells four days old.

Kind of hard to have eggshells when you’d been bitten by the other person, though.

He shrugged off the teeth marks. Didn’t matter.

“Outer-rim space exploration,” he said. “Testing humanity’s limits in space. That kind of, uh. Sci-fi romanticism.”

“Doesn’t sound romantic,” Keith said. “There’s a lot of emptiness in space and not much to fill it. I’d rather stick to closer quadrants where there’s actually stuff to pilot around and land on. Sci-fi romanticism usually requires something other than a forty year cryo sleep.”

“It’s not like they’d jettison me off to Andromeda alone or anything,” Shiro said. “…Not that I’d be super opposed to that if it were the only method of getting there.”

“You would die. And so would the mission without a subsequent generation to populate it.”

“Well you’re not taking into account my ability to self-replicate. It makes me the perfect candidate, really. They call me the amoeba—no, amoebo. Shiro the Amoebo.”

“…What.”

“Never mind. I’m interested in deep-space exploration. Is what I should have said.”

“Oh. I figured special projects would have better defined categories. Or at least some specifics.”

“They do, but—really I just want to pilot and collect samples. See what’s out there.”

“Rocks.”

Shiro slowed his steps and gave Keith look.

“Sorry?”

Keith stopped in the hallway and turned to face Shiro. His features were carefully expressionless.

“Rocks,” he repeated. “That’s what’s in deep space. A few rocks, and a few dead things and a lot of empty between those two categories.”

Shiro frowned and planted his hands on his hips. His “convincing posture,” as Matt had deemed it.

“…True…” he said slowly. “I can’t really argue with you on that. But we’ve only started to really push ourselves beyond our first jumps into sub-space. I don’t think we can discount the entire possibility of something else being somewhere out there based on a few measly jumps. It would be like dipping your toe into the ocean, not encountering any octopus, and assuming there’s no octopus in the ocean.”

“…Why octopus. For this particular metaphor.”

“They’re neat. Kind of alien with—you know.” Shiro slowly waggled his arms. “Tentacles. Also beaks. Which why nature decided to fuck with us by giving these intelligent multi-armed creatures beaks of all things is beyond me, but.”

“Oh.” 

Keith crossed his arms over his chest, his thick brows furrowing.

“You’re not—you don’t think it’s all. Dead,” he said slowly. “You think aliens are real.”

“They’re a possibility,” Shiro corrected. “A likely one, but physics as we understand it doesn’t really allow for the likelihood of anything resembling contact. Let alone that we’d be able to understand each other.”

Keith’s lips quirked up into a grin. Empty and difficult to read.

“So no song exchange at Devil’s Tower.”

“Nothing so ‘Third Kind,’ no. Plus you gotta figure if there is extraterrestrial life that makes it here, they’ve already seen the flick and deemed it a little gouache.”

“Gouache.”

“Yeah—you know. Tacky. Classless—”

“I know what gouache means.”

“Good because I ran out of explanatory synonyms pretty quickly.”

“It’s just weird hearing it in this. Military. Base. Or… whatever…”

Keith trailed off, staring fixedly at a point over Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro raised an eyebrow.

“…Apologies for the abrupt genre shift, but if this were a zombie movie I’d be afraid to turn around right now.”

“There’s no such thing as zombies,” Keith answered without shifting his gaze. “Dead musculature wouldn’t be able to heal after ripping. They’d cease being ambulatory quickly.”

Shiro waited for a moment for Keith to stop staring (and stop spouting horror movie facts that were going to keep him up at night) but then grew impatient and looked over his shoulder. Classrooms. Vending machine. Sim room. Windows.

Shiro followed Keith’s gaze, unsurprised when it landed on the sim room name plate. Disappointed that it didn’t linger around the vending machine first.

“That doesn’t say ‘conference room.’ Of any letter. Just in case you’re having trouble reading,” he said dryly.

“I can read.”

“Can you also read the huge sign that says ‘Off Limits During Finals/Orientation’?”

“…I’m pretending I can’t.”

Shiro weighed his options for a long half second and then tapped Keith’s shoulder. The other cadet started, but didn’t back away.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have any money on you?”

Keith stared at him.

“Are you. Mugging me?”

“Yes this has been the longest, least-profitable grift.” Shiro gestured towards the vending machine. “Bag of Doritos and I let you into the sim room. I’ve got clearance to practice now that my exams are over. And I see you’re still missing your ID band, so…”

Shiro waved his wrist in front of Keith. Keith’s eyes tracked the motion. More eager than Shiro had ever seen him.

“Doritos and petty extortion don’t match your image,” was all Keith said, even as his gaze slid from the band around Shiro’s wrist and back to the sim door.

“I worked hard this week. I deserve a treat. Also, I hate to say it, that’s the healthiest option in there. By a wide, depressing margin.”

“And you’re letting me miss orientation.”

“It’ll break for the day in just a few minutes. Sanders is running it this year, if memory serves, and the guy is allergic to working past three. The most you’d catch right now is a lecture on class attendance which I can sum up in two easy installments of ‘don’t’ and ‘skip.’ You’ll learn more getting acquainted with the sim. Plus…” Shiro faltered, not sure if he wanted to reveal his simultaneous nerves and pride. “…Rumor says you’re a rather good pilot. And I’ve been told I have some skill in that arena.”

He grinned sheepishly.

“Chalk it up to curiosity. I’d like to see what you’re made of before your instructors meddle and polish away any rough edges.”

“I am a good pilot,” Keith said without missing a beat. “…But uh. If. ‘Rough edges’ is some kind of piloting term, I’m. Not overly familiar with it.”

“It’s a construct of my own invention. Trying to match you, Fancyword.”

“I’m not fancy. And neither are the words ‘rough’ and ‘edge.’ Even in the plural.” Keith raised a thick eyebrow. “But what did you mean by that? And does the vending machine take spare change or does it use some futuristic payment technology. Like donating plasma to buy a thing of Cheetos.”

“Sadly the ‘blood for donuts’ initiative ended in failure after too many cadets passed out in pursuit of snacking. Spare change works.” Shiro headed over to the machine. “And I all I meant was—dammit, out of Cool Ranch…”

“…Is ‘cool ranch’ code for something else too?” Keith asked, stepping up to the machine as well.

“I guess it could describe my ideal flying style. In some… Dadaist way. But no, I meant the chip flavor.” 

“It comes in ranch?” Keith said. He sounded horrified. “How—is the bag all. Wet inside.”

Shiro stared at Keith, slightly distressed.

“…Did your guardian not buy you terrible junk food as a kid?”

“No,” Keith said. “We got store brand tortilla chips. I cut the roof of my mouth one too many times and swore them off. Didn’t seem worth it.”

He slotted a few bills into the machine and then stepped back, leaning against the wall.

“That should be enough, right.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Shiro said, keying in the Nacho Cheese code. He bent down to retrieve the bag and then stared at it. 

“My first successful act of bribery.” He frowned. “Somehow I thought I’d feel more…. I dunno. Renegade.”

“Maybe you will after I call the authorities and report your improper conduct.” Keith moved to stand in front of the sim door. He was shifting from one foot to the other. Impatience personified.

Shiro shoved a few chips into his mouth before holding up his band in front of the room lock. It opened with a satisfying click, followed by a whoosh of the doors. He followed Keith inside, who had already run through the darkened room over to the only sim that was illuminated. The instructor’s.

Shiro made sure the door closed behind them and spent a moment debating whether or not to activate the main lights before deciding against it. Better not to risk drawing attention to themselves.

Shiro silently watched Keith inspect the machine, remembering every so often to eat a chip. He was starting to feel a little guilty for manipulating Keith into spending whole. Cents on him.

Best to drown those thoughts with sodium.

Shiro licked a bit of artificial cheese dust off his fingers. Keith had popped open one of the access panels and was rummaging around inside. Hopefully not electrocuting himself.

Shiro waited to see if Keith would say anything. Ask for advice. Assistance.

Minutes passed. Each one marked by a Dorito.

...Apparently help wasn’t needed.

Shiro tucked the half-full bag of chips inside Keith’s ratty messenger bag before walking over to the sim. He leaned against the shell and peered around to where Keith was hunched over the settings panel, a serious look on his flushed face.

Shiro waited to be noticed for the two seconds of patience he had left now that he was no longer satisfying his exhaustion and hunger with snack foods.

Finally he gave up and lightly rapped on the hull.

“You said ‘we’ back in the hallway when you were sharing that, uh. Touching tortilla story. Do you have siblings?”

“No,” Keith said. His voice was muffled inside the sim’s exterior shell.

Shiro frowned.

“Cousins?”

“No.”

“…Pets you identified too closely with?”

“No. Quit asking and focus on your chips. Please.”

“Little bossy towards someone who’s doing you a favor,” Shiro pointed out as mildly as he could.

Keith’s extracted himself from the control panel and stared up at Shiro, looking wary.

“It’s not—I’m not trying to order you around,” he said haltingly.”I just—…with personal stuff, it’s—… never mind.”

He ducked back behind the panel with a muffled, ‘ignore me,’ and fell silent after that.

“…That was kind of nosy. Sorry,” Shiro said, when it became clear that Keith was solely focused on tampering with Garrison property. “Just trying to do the whole. Friend thing. Asking questions… Maybe a bit too fast, though. We all have stuff we don’t want to talk about.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,” Keith muttered without looking up, even as his cheeks turned a darker crimson. “I just don’t see how it’s relevant. We’re here to test out the sim, right?”

“…Right,” Shiro said, too gracious to point out how obvious it was that Keith wasn’t telling the whole truth. “…Speaking of which, what are you doing?”

“This is the instructor’s sim. Which means there’s more malleable settings… I want to try working in suboptimal gravity conditions.”

“…I’m guessing ‘suboptimal’ in your vocabulary is code for something like black hole event horizons.”

Keith snorted and closed the panel as he stood back up. His blush was under control. Mostly.

“If the Garrison’s five-year-ancient physics engines could actually simulate that I’d love to try. I was thinking more gravity waves in asteroid belts. Things like that.”

“Oh,” Shiro said, relieved. “That’s doable. …I think.”

He pressed his ID up to the sim and the door clicked open. He waited for the “whoosh,” and when none came he groaned and looked up at the ceiling.

“Low power operations. Right.”

“What’s that mean?”

Shiro braced his shoulder against the sim door and pushed. Hard.

“It means—operating under… semi-manual conditions…”

With one last shove the sim door popped all the way open. The moment there was room enough, Keith skirted around Shiro and managed to worm inside the cramped, dimly-lit sim cabin. He immediately sat down in the captain’s chair but then froze and glanced towards the door.

“…If I buy you another bag of chips, can I drive.”

“As tempting an offer as that is, I don’t want to become too predictable with my villainy. You can just owe me,” Shiro said. He tugged the door shut and carefully eased himself into the copilot’s seat. It was a small two-person cabin. None of the frills of the added engineers stations. Which made it cramped. Good for testing the small ships capable of making planet-side jumps, though. The ID panel in front of them was glowing blue, and Shiro took a moment to log in, registering the practice as “software testing” so it wouldn’t be recorded in his official scores. Also technically not a lie. Since he had no idea what Keith had actually done to the settings.

He could feel Keith staring at him. Fixedly.

“Question?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the control panel.

Keith pointed to Shiro’s ID brace.

“That operates sims too?”

“I told you, it does everything. I’m taking you to get yours fixed after this.”

“…I can’t practice in a sim without one?”

“Correct.”

Keith made a frustrated noise and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Fine,” he muttered, sinking a bit in his seat.

Shiro glanced at the other cadet, one eyebrow raised.

“…This is a fun energy you’re bringing to our session.”

Keith slowly pushed himself up (which in the dim light made him look like a strange snake monster since his arms were still crossed).

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I— That Ames guy is in charge of stuff like this. Right.”

“You don’t like him?”

Keith shook his head and muttered, “He’s also nosy,” and then quickly course-corrected, “He’s nosy. No also.”

“He’s doing his job,” Shiro said, trying to keep from getting too annoyed. “Just like I’m doing mine. Making sure that none of the new cadets do anything stupid or reckless—”

“This is a job to you?”

Shiro’s finger stilled on the keypad. Hovering over enter.

Keith’s voice had cracked with surprise. Exposed raw hurt.

Shiro slowly took a step away from the ravine of human-decency-crushing-conversations he’d nearly thrown himself into.

He hit enter and sat back, waiting for the program to boot up. He cycled through possible answers. Quickly. Carefully. He could hear Keith’s breathing picking up. Forced back to normal.

Sarcasm was tempting. The cabin was claustrophobically small. The lightness offered by levity would make it easier to breathe. Put it off for now, that question that they’d both inadvertently ripped the bandage off of. The one that shouldn’t have meant anything at all, three days and eighteen hours into meeting.

But it was heavy. Like the air in the gym, the weight of space that had stretched between them in Keith’s room. It was methodically unthreading the screws of the cabin hull. Worming its way inside.

Why was he here. Next to this stranger whose simple presence made time vomit up the normally stringent rules that governed it. It was strange. And now without exams or outside distractions, just the glowing purple interior of the sim cabin and the warmth of another beating presence, centimeters away, it was almost frightening. 

Levity would be strangled, Shiro thought, watching the loading bar on the screen inch its solid way up the empty space. Before it could catch its breath. By Keith, probably. Or whatever the creeping presence was on the outside of the hull. Some dark certainty. Not unkind, but very, very sure of itself. And a little. Smug. Oddly enough.

Shiro shook its head to clear it, annoyed with himself. Personifying social anxiety. Indulging whatever stress-trip he’d been on, granting it legitimacy. Some scientist he was.

He tapped the controls to register the custom settings. Double checked basic calibration.

Honesty it was. Yet again. He was too frustrated with himself for anything else.

“No. This isn’t a job,” he said. Watched the bar hit seventy. “With a job, I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Have some—slight. Inkling, even, of what it is, exactly, I’m doing. If you hadn’t come get me I would be running laps outside. Like I’ve done every year, because that’s my job. I don’t know what this is.”

He glanced at Keith out of the corner of his eye.

“Do you?”

Keith’s eyes glowed in the dim light of the console. He was staring at the loading bar as well. His hands were balled into fists. Fingers digging into the fabric of his uniform.

Shiro wondered if he could hear the screws untwisting too. By whatever it was in the space outside. Needing in.

“…I didn’t meet Matt.”

Shiro furrowed his brow and looked away from the control panel.

“What?”

“Your friend. That’s his name, right—”

“We all know who Matt is. What do you mean you didn’t meet him?”

“When I came to find you.”

Keith’s shoulders tensed. He was still staring at the loading bar. Eight three.

“I didn’t run into your friend. I didn’t ask him where you were. And I didn’t need to look in all the classrooms, I just. I knew that—I didn’t think in steps or rooms, it wasn’t like following a map. It was all—it was just… this knowledge of a space. Knowing it like—I dunno. Like when you wake up knowing what you knew when you were asleep until it gets all tangled up in thinking and the more you try and look at it the fuzzier it gets… Or when you smell something from an old somewhere you knew but you can’t quite place it. And that need to know—that instinct to scratch around in the back of your skull looking for it…”

Keith swallowed heavily. Shiro could see his throat move. Heavy. Eight seven.

“The day we met—when it was storming, and I went out to that weird shed in the desert. It happened then, too. I felt like—like tearing my skin off that whole day. I had to move, I had to go—I had to find what it was. Lodged in wherever place in the back of my head I don’t have access to. I followed it out into the desert but it turned out to just be that shed. Empty. And I was. Upset.”

Keith ran a hand down his face. He was shaking.

“I sound like a freak.”

Shiro averted his gaze. Gave Keith some semblance of privacy to pull himself together. If he wanted.

“No you don’t.”

He tapped his fingers against the arm rest. Listened to the screws slowly turn.

“You sound like the inside of my head right now.”

Keith was staring at him again. Hands lowering to rest in his lap.

Nine two.

“...Remember how I said I wasn’t in the habit of running away from things I’m afraid of.”

Nine five. Keith’s voice was tense.

Shiro nodded.

“I remember.”

Nine eight.

Keith’s fingers wrapped around the sim controls. His face pale. Glowing eyes fixed on the screen in front of them.

“That’s what this is.”

The screen flashed white, three times. Warning them the simulation was about to start.

Shiro wrenched his gaze away from Keith and focused on his own screen. Keith had selected a basic cargo mission. Run time, seventy five minutes.

The first gravity wave hit two seconds onto the program. Shiro cursed and gently course corrected, fixing Keith’s slight overcompensation. The sim chose to break a fuel line to punish them for the error. Shiro clicked his tongue in annoyance and tightened his grip on the controls.

“Since we don’t have anyone to terminate the program and let us out before it’s done, now’s probably not the best time to confess that that the feeling is mutual.”

Keith gave him a sharp look and then turned back to the screen.

“…Probably not.”

The cabin fell silent, save for the quiet hum of the machine encasing them. Painful seconds dragging on, morphing seamlessly into minutes as tense concentration took hold.

Another gravity wave was coming in on their four. Shiro waited to see what adjustments Keith made. Kept the thrust sensors in manual. Wrong. Twelve percent increase on engines two and four. Slightly less wrong.

Shiro bumped the increase up to twenty but left the thrusters to Keith. Since he thought he worked better than a computer at dealing with minute course corrections.

The gravity wave tore across their sensors, temporarily jamming them. Keith didn’t seem to notice. The light glinting off his face cast his eyes in wild, unpredictable shadows. His teeth flashed white as his lips pulled back in a grin.

Another line down, a few servos worse for wear. The “ship” had rolled too far, risking pulling smaller asteroids into their wake. But they’d cleared the wave. Under manual control, no less.

Shiro slowly let go of the controls and sat back. Waited to see if Keith would realize his second was no longer responsive.

Gravity wave number three. A series of reckless corrections that blew more fuses, strained the engines to keep the ship from listing.

Six minutes left in the program. 

Shiro had tugged his legs up to sit cross-legged in his seat. Watching Keith. He flew like a rouge AI, unsure if it should crash the ship and end its own tormented existence or complete its primary objective. Capable of scraping together the reflexes to do either, deciding in a split second, every ounce of attention it possessed devoted to that single task of decision making embedded in each instant.

The program was brutal. Equipment sensitivity set to high, real-world strain conditions, abnormal gravity wells. No second, although Keith still had yet to comment on Shiro’s lack of contribution. All theoretical impossibilities for a first year pilot.

The “ship” limped over the finish line. Two engines down. Most servos unresponsive. Life-support hanging on by a thread. Imaginary cargo—Shiro always liked to imagine coconuts, for some reason—half lost, the result of a missing bay door.

But PROGRAMME CLEAR still flashed across the screen. The latch on the door clicked open.

Slowly Keith’s fingers unwrapped from the throttle. He sat back in his seat, unaware (or not caring) that the program wouldn’t shut off until cool down steps were initiated and completed. There’d be a warning buzzer soon.

Shiro waited a few seconds before beginning the cool down himself. He really didn’t want to hear that buzzer. It was loud.

Keith jumped at the movement and finally looked over at him. His brows were furrowed in confusion as he took in Shiro’s posture.

“…When’d you stop helping.”

Shiro didn’t bother looking over. He was checking the record logs. Two more minutes and the ship would’ve self-destructed. Unsurprising given the number of hits they’d taken.

“After the second wave.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s not called ‘helping.’ I’m your co-pilot.”

“It has ‘co-‘ in the title. Implies help.”

“It implies cooperation.”

Shiro pulled the logs up onto the main screen. He quickly scanned them, noting the places where the computer had had to take over. Surprisingly few. And every time Keith had overwritten the autopilot.

“Has anyone told you that you might have some control issues?” he asked mildly.

“They haven’t phrased it exactly like that.”

“Then allow me the honor of being the first.”

Shiro pointed to a timestamp in the logs.

“You could’ve saved one of your engines if you’d trusted the autopilot here. Or if you’d given me an order to take over thrusters while you did route recalculations.”

“…You’re joking, right.”

“I’ve been told my sarcasm is hard to detect sometimes, so I’ll reassure you that I’m not.”

“I’m supposed to order you around?”

“You’re supposed to give orders to your co-pilot. To help avoid death by engine failure. Or any of the literal thousands of ways even a simple cargo run can go wrong.”

“But I didn’t die. Even without your help. I mean, your, uh. Cooperation.”

“True, but you lost half your cargo. And cost the Garrison or whoever owns the ship hundreds of thousands in repairs. You’re too reckless with—”

“But I won.”

Frustration was creeping into Keith’s voice. Shiro tapped his band against the panel to download the logs and then turned to Keith, trying to keep his own temper. Keith was new. He had to remember that.

“The only thing we train for in these things is to get the skills to ensure that someone else’s day or career isn’t ruined by an error you caused. Sim training isn’t a game—”

“I never said it was!”

“Well you were pretty much playing ping-pong with the asteroids so it was a little hard to tell.”

Keith had crossed his arms over his chest again. He was staring at his knees, a heavy scowl on his face. He didn’t look like the ethereal thing that carried a chunk of space in the back of his head. The thing Shiro caught glimpses of out of the corner of his eye that made his stomach churn with nerves.

He looked human. And sorely disappointed, furious and cheated in that identity.

And maybe fighting back frustrated tears. The corners of his eyes were turning red.

Shiro let out a little breath and silently debated with himself for a long moment. Finally he reached out and tapped Keith’s chair.

“Do you need to use the restroom?”

Keith lifted his head and fixed him with a strange, irritated look.

“No. Why.”

Shiro stood up.

“Switch places with me.”

Keith narrowed his eyes.

“…Why.”

“We’re running it again.”

Keith’s thick eyebrows knitted together. For a while he remained still. Then without a word he carefully pushed himself out of his seat and settled into the co-pilot’s chair.

Shiro sat down as well and spent a few minutes reloading the same program. Keith watched him, wariness in his expression again.

The door latch clicked shut once more. Screen flashed white.

Shiro checked the readout and then reached over to lightly tap Keith’s console.

“Keith, what readings do you have for engine one output? Does it look a little off to you?”

“…Huh? Oh. Uh.”

Keith fell silent for half a second before venturing, “It’s a little low?”

“That’s what I thought. Can you recalibrate the balance while I double check our coordinates?”

“…Sure.”

Keith worked in silence, but the moment the engines were balanced he said tersely, “I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that.”

“If this is a lesson, or—”

“I’m not an instructor. Thank god. Can you check servo A-2? First wave’s coming up.”

Keith made a frustrated noise but did as he was asked.

“The Garrison is all about teams,” Keith tried again, “They drove that home in the two minutes of orientation I did sit through. So I get it. You don’t have to—”

“It’s not that either.”

Shiro fell quiet as the first wave hit, concentrating on getting the “ship” through unscathed. The moment the wave passed, Keith turned to him, his cheeks red and his knuckles white.

“Then why are you making me run it again? I can just read the logs later.”

“You looked like you were having fun,” Shiro said, regretting his decision but feeling too stubborn to back out now. That and the latched, sealed door made running kind of hard. “I think I might have ruined that. So I—I just figured it might be more fun to… to win. But win… better. Maybe a few more engines intact.” He turned his attention back to the display, switching autopilot on before glancing at Keith. His co-pilot was looking unsure. The fight that had been building up in his shoulders was beginning to bleed out. 

Shiro worried at his lip before saying hesitantly, “We could just steer straight into the nearest asteroid. Always did wonder what that kind of reckless disregard for my sim score would feel like.”

“…No, I—…It was fun.”

Keith’s fingers drummed against the console. Thinking.

He finally sat up straight. Made adjustments to fuel intake. Shiro took it as a sign to continue and grabbed the controls again. For a long time they worked in silence, save for the necessary bursts of communication. Adjustments made. Sync found. Occasionally Shiro switched primary throttle controls to Keith’s console so he could put out the numerous little fires the sim threw their way. Each time Keith responded with a quiet, “Thanks.” His piloting was just as reckless. They lost an engine in the fourth gravity wave when Keith clipped an asteroid, but Shiro adjusted, and at Keith’s silent request took over again.

Two minutes remaining in the program. Landing sequence completed. Just had to wait for the all clear.

“…You’re good at this.”

It took Shiro a bit to register the non-tech conversation. 

“Yeah?” he said, aiming for polite. “Like I said I’ve piloted before, so… I’d hope I’m at least a little competent.”

Keith’s cheeks were red, visible even in the low cabin light. His fingers were drumming on the consol again. Flicking a button cover open and shut.

“No, I didn’t mean—…never mind.”

“…Okay.” Shiro relaxed in the pilot’s seat, watching stars lazily drift across the monitor. “I’m not one to fish for compliments, anyway. No matter how, uh. Obtuse.”

“I’m not trying to be obtuse. I’m trying to not sound stupid. Done enough of that today,” Keith muttered. He’d drawn a knee up to his chest and was idly tapping buttons on the console. A simple rhythm. One Shiro had heard before.

From Keith, even.

Shiro closed his eyes. Listened to the click of Keith’s blunt fingernail against the plastic button.

“What song is that?”

“What.”

“That you’re tapping out.”

“Oh.”

Keith’s finger stilled, then cautiously picked up the rhythm again.

“I don’t remember. It’s just how my fingers move. I guess.”

Shiro cracked open an eye and turned his head to look across the cabin at Keith. 

“…Are you really afraid of me?”

The rhythm stuttered. Dark eyes flicked to the side to meet his own.

A small nod. Almost imperceptible in the dark.

Tapping resumed.

“You feel empty.”

Shiro frowned, honestly a bit hurt.

“Ouch.”

“No not—not like you’re. I dunno. Heartless or anything.”

Keith had propped his chin on his knee and was staring straight ahead at the pixilated stars in the screen. Suddenly he reached out. Pointed to a cluster of black pixels.

“That,” he said. As though it were explanation for anything.

Shiro stared at the spot.

“…I feel like a computer monitor.”

Keith made a frustrated growl. Low in his throat.

“The space between things,” he said, his voice dragging over his teeth. “That kind of empty. Like there should be something there, or… there is something but it’s imperceptible. Some distant galaxy that just looks like a dust speck. Or maybe just radiation.”

Shiro leaned forward and peered at the screen. Focused his vision until he could see the individual pixels.

“…That’s oddly depressing,” he said. He glanced at Keith. “I can’t tell if this means you hate me.”

“I don’t—I. I’m bad with. Pinning things like this down,” Keith said, now visibly flustered. “I didn’t mean to be a jerk. But you did ask. So.”

Shiro made a little ‘ah’ noise and sat back. He flipped on the extra coolant valves. Keith mimicked his actions.

One minute left in the program. 

“Can you answer something for me?” Shiro asked suddenly.

Keith made a soft noise of agreement.

Shiro tugged his legs up to sit cross-legged in the pilot’s seat. He stared at the screen in front of him. The thousands of lifeless, darkened pixels.

“If I feel so… empty. Why do you keep tracking me down?”

Keith let out a little puff of air and rested his cheek on his knees.

“You want to do deep-space jumps where there’s literally nothing but emptiness. Why are you bothering to ask me to define its appeal.”

“Because I know my motivations for doing stupid, hopeless shit. I don’t know yours.”

Keith frowned and for a while fell silent. Tilted his head back, staring up at the purpled ceiling. “Because its monstrous,” he said. “And unfathomable. And because you hope something’s there.” He spoke slowly. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

Shiro let nearly jumped out of his seat when the program ending buzzer went off. He quickly set the “ship” into cooldown mode. The hatch lock clicked open, but neither of them moved. Maybe Keith was pretending he hadn’t heard it. Like Shiro was pretending.

“Empty and monstrous. You really have a way with adjectives there, Poe,” Shiro said dryly.

“Why do you care what I think,” Keith said with a little snort. “You didn’t know me four days ago.”

“But I know you now,” Shiro said, “And I’m used to being disliked for more obvious things. Not for weird—…space exploration metaphors.”

“Forget I said anything, then. Even though you were the one who asked.” Dark eyes fixed on Shiro. “Are you really afraid of me.”

“‘Afraid’ isn’t the word I’d use in this particular moment.”

“Earlier moments, then.”

Shiro’s fingers stuttered on the keyboard. He carefully retyped the last bit of code and then completed the cool down program. The sim gave a happy chirping noise as it shut down, leaving them in the violet-soaked light of the cabin. A few star clusters drifted across the monitor. Now more a screen saver than anything reflective of reality.

Shiro rested his hands in his lap. It was harder now to come into contact with that instinctual response that had infected him since he’d first laid eyes on Keith. 

At the moment Keith wasn’t much of anything at all, really, other than a new cadet, surprisingly adapt at flying, but nothing especially noteworthy. Those little bolts of unease that surfaced on occasion, triggered by nothing significant at all; in the sim cabin, they felt alien and distant. As though they weren’t even his own experiences. Which in and of itself was frightening. Because Shiro clearly remembered being afraid. In the desert storm, in the hallway. In that strange, lost chunk of time in the gym. Shiro remembered fear, but now had no way of articulating it or even guessing as to its source. All there was, was a feeling of being untethered. Blinking in and out of the sum of his memories and rewriting them each time. Distorting them too, maybe. There was no way to tell.

Shiro shuddered and pushed the feeling away. It was easily detached, but floated off to rest just out of sight. Still present.

“…Yeah,” Shiro said finally. “No good reason for it. You just feel—…”

He struggled to find the words. Gave up quickly and took a page out of Keith’s Manual For The Obtuse.

He pointed at a star streaking across the monitor. The flash of white pixels illuminated Keith’s gaze for a moment. Tracking it.

“…Why.”

Shiro stretched his legs out and propped them on the console. A few buttons beeped warnings at him, but he just shushed them and moved his feet until he found less responsive switches. He hummed in thought for a moment before saying slowly, “Volatility.” He quirked a tired smile at Keith. “And, you know. Surreal intrigue. Maybe radiation. So we can match.”

“Surreal,” Keith echoed. There was a note of anxiety in his voice. “You mean I feel off.”

“What—no! Well. Yes.”

“You do that back and forth with yourself a lot. It’s not my favorite.”

“Feeling ‘off’ isn’t a bad thing,” Shiro said as reassuringly as he could. “…Well maybe it is—”

“What did I just say.”

Shiro dragged his hand down his face.

“Sorry— I promise it’s not intentional. And I meant that at least with you it’s this. Intriguing kind of ‘off.’ Loads better than my own brand of ‘off.’ Which until today I thought meant that I just give people the regular creeps, not that I make them think of the empty void that comprises most of the universe.”

Keith started in his seat and turned to stare at Shiro.

“…You give people the creeps?”

“Other than you, you mean? Apparently.” Shiro lightly tapped his foot against the pillar in the middle of the console. “It’s partially my fault. I was shuttled around to different schools as a kid. Coursework was really the only thing that was consistent, so it was the only thing I liked, and it made me develop this… Intensity, I guess. That people don’t like dealing with in large quantities. I can’t blame them. Not really a fan myself. That, and my family’s reputation and my status as a Garrison legacy don’t exactly help—”

“Misako Shirogane.”

Shiro gave Keith a sharp look.

“…Yeah,” he said finally. “How do you know my mom’s name?”

“Pictures in the hall memorabilia cases.” Keith’s face turned red. Visible even in the dim light. “And in, uh. Datachives.”

Shiro felt his own cheeks heat up. He cleared his throat and concentrated on tapping his foot against the pillar. Trying to replicate the rhythm Keith’s fingers had been making earlier.

“You looked me up?” he asked. Halfway flattered, halfway worried he was going to end up on some sensational news program. Fingerprints sliced off. That kind of thing.

“I was bored. And Alex kept talking about you.” Keith scowled. “They knew stuff that they said was common knowledge. About you. And I hate not knowing.”

“…Not knowing things in general, or. Not knowing about me. In the specific,” Shiro said cautiously.

“You specifically,” Keith answered, seeming not to pick up on Shiro’s wariness. He frowned and prodded a random button on the console. “They don’t know—the way they talked about you—Alex and all their new friends. Like you’re not even human. It irritated me.” He rolled his eyes and sat back in his seat. “I kind of got worked up over nothing, though. Once I picked through their flowery language I realized they just think you’re a good pilot. Which any organism with more than two brain cells could figure that out. And I thought Alex was supposed to be some sort of prodigy.”

“Flowery… what.” Shiro ran his fingers through his hair, his whole face warm. “What were they all saying, exactly.”

Keith slouched down in his seat again. Fingers plucking at his uniform.

“General observations about your skill set. Some rumors about your family history. Lots of comparing you to different fictional characters. A disproportionate amount of them were, uh. Animated. And some flavor of singing royalty.”

“…Great. Glad my reputation is preceding me again.”

Shiro mimicked Keith’s posture, sinking lower and lower in his seat until his head was at a very uncomfortable angle. The discomfort distracted him from his rising irritation. And a bit of panic. It had been a long time since anyone but an instructor associated him so strongly with said “rumors” about his family. He’d done his best to keep his head down. Went by a nickname now. But if the new cadets were already starting to talk, then it probably wouldn’t be long until more people were saying the name Misako Shirogane. And next time she was on the news—

Fuck. 

He could feel Keith’s gaze on him, and when he looked the other cadet had a pinched expression.

“You’re upset,” Keith guessed. His voice echoed hollowly in the sim cabin.

Shiro took a moment to cast his mind around in his emotions. Tried to sort them out into some order that didn’t ricochet all over the place from one anxiety to the next. He didn’t owe the other cadet an explanation. Should probably just say “no” when he clearly meant “yes” and render the whole conversation too awkward to continue limping along like it already was. But that would be a truly dickish thing to do to someone who had bought him chips and let him gently bully into running a full-length sim again. Even if they were both wary of the other and even admitting that particular fact hadn’t exactly lessened the feeling. Had elevated it, really. Made Shiro hyper aware of Keith’s movements. Where his gaze was resting, the sweep of his hair over his ears, into his eyes. Fraying from split ends. The tap of his ragged fingernails. Puffy around the cuticles from torn, untended skin. Details that kept worming into Shiro’s brain without him exactly inviting them. Details that made him want to be kind and honest even when he was annoyed and approaching alarmed. Two vastly, vastly different strategies for coping with the being in front of him. One that was clearly four days old, that wanted nothing more than to tell Keith to mind his own business. And one that felt old. Felt ancient, really, that was hurt that Keith even had to ask if he was upset. Expected him to just. Know.

The unfairness of that expectation made Shiro roll his eyes at himself. Grow frustrated with the spinning of his own neural clusters. The crick in his neck wasn’t helping his mood, either, but the thought of moving was a little much.

“I’m not super fond of standing out,” he said finally. “My parents—if you’ve looked at the datachive, you know. Celebrity status. All that. People start to pin expectations on you and then if you fall short, it—…I hate letting people down. Or building up their hopes, really, that’s… that’s so much worse. The first time I came here, there was a lot of that. People giving me special treatment. So when I took a few quarters off they talked about it like… Like I’d failed some great calling. When really all I wanted was a break. Some distance to reassess. Instead it made me feel like I’d let down my old classmates, my old sim team… I was supposed to be this great… demigod. Legacy and all of that. And I’m not—I’m just a decent pilot with good study habits. But I tried so… so hard to not let anyone down and when I couldn’t it sort of… blew up in my face. So now I just want to keep my head down, do my job, complete my assignments and get everyone home safely. Be… boring. I guess. Ideally be a no one. No ones don’t get datachive entries. But I can’t do that if I have a bunch of people throwing… flowery words at me. Or making me into something I’m not. I don’t—the thought of anyone else trying to define what I am based on my genealogy or some arbitrary sim result—it’s stupid. I’m just a cadet—I’m not even officially in any program! I’m just a wannabe scientist who can’t hold a candle to the most likely special projects candidate in anything but physical specs. And who cares about that if I just end up some—some braindead, dreamless meat jockey like my dad?! Or worse—a fuckup of a leader like my mom who can’t go one mission without someone on her team dying?!”

Shiro tried to swallow around the lump in his throat, but his aggravation, the embarrassment at being so stupidly honest about inconsequential stuff he’d never dared say to Matt or any of his instructors. That lump of shame and anger made it almost impossible. And the air in the sim cabin was getting staler and staler with the program done and Keith was just looking at him, some unreadable expression on his face that Shiro felt like he’d seen a million times before. Something that should have been clear and vibrant and familiar and comforting but it just felt alien, it felt like pity even though the flash in Keith’s eyes said anything but and Shiro still could feel that lump in his throat, scratching its claws into his esophagus—

With a frustrated snarl Shiro slammed his hand into the seat armrest. Forgot, in his stupid, juvenile outburst, that there was a series of sharp metal panel covers on the armrests.

The shock of pain was enough to make him sit upright, at least. Like an adult. Like a fucking special projects hopeful and not some petulant child.

He stared miserably at his hand. A few cuts along the outside. Not too deep, thankfully. But there was some blood, and there would be bruising.

Keith was still staring at him. Inscrutable. Immobile. His gestures meaningless. Details uncatalogued, unnoticed.

Shiro let out a shaky breath. Counted to ten.

“Sorry,” he said, and tried to keep his voice light. Pretended it wasn’t shaking. “I’m not the best at keeping my emotions in check. I shouldn’t have done that.”

For a long moment Keith continued to stare at him. Then he glanced down at his own armrest and ran the pads of his fingertips over the metal. His lips drew up in a grimace.

“It’s fine,” he said without looking up. “You didn’t hit anything that cares if it’s hit. And it’s kind of my fault. I could tell you didn’t want to talk but I still asked.”

“I wouldn’t have hit you,” Shiro blurted out, suddenly terrified that Keith was terrified of him. In a concrete way, not the weird specter that lingered around them like an obnoxious Poltergeist extra. 

Keith shrugged and repeated, “It was my fault.” He finally lifted his gaze from the arm rest. Met Shiro’s eyes with a challenging stare. “I would’ve ducked in time, anyway. Your right hook is slow.”

“It’s not—… really?” Shiro shook his head and then sank down in his chair, groaning. “Great, well. Another thing to add to my ever-increasing list of self-improvement projects.” He ran his thumb over the torn skin in his hand.

“I wouldn’t have hit you,” he said again. Softer this time. “And it’s not your fault. I’m supposed to be—…I’m supposed to be one of the good guys. I’m supposed to be better than this. And it’s…”

He trailed off, realizing barely in time that he was quickly spiraling down to another inane ramble. He mumbled a quiet apology and inspected his hand in silence. Hard to see anything in the dim, purple light. But he pretended, and Keith was nice enough to let him.

Suddenly Keith moved. He rested his pale fingers on Shiro’s armrest. Palm up.

“Let me see.” 

“Keith, it’s nothing,” Shiro said, drawing back slightly. “Just some scrapes. I’m used to it—I do stupid shit like this all the time. I can tell when I’m seriously injured.”

Keith started to pull his hand away, but then an irritated, stubborn look took hold of his features. He thrust his hand out again and said more insistently, “Let me see your hand, Shiro.” There was a slight tremor to his voice. His fingertips twitched in the still, stagnant air. Reacting to some invisible current.

Shiro remained still. Counted the dust motes that floated between them. Illuminated in the dimming light of the monitor, projecting its fake stars onto the ceiling.

“…Don’t look too closely,” he said at last. “There’s some older mar—”

“Fine,” Keith said impatiently, and grabbed his hand out of the air. He scooted to the edge of his seat and tugged Shiro’s hand closer to his face.

Shiro bore the silent scrutiny and tried to keep his fingers from twitching. His right hand had a bit of scarring from similar, stupider outbursts. Outbursts and one unfortunate incident where he’d been helping a friend move and had dropped a bookcase on his hand. The last time anyone had looked closely had been the Garrison intake doctor. She’d skipped the bookcase injuries completely. She’d run her finger over his damaged pinkie and looked him square in the face, and Shiro could tell she knew. She hadn’t said anything other than, “You should probably talk to someone about this.” Her frown of disapproval, the way her pen lingered on some parts of the form. Neither easily forgotten.

But Keith didn’t linger. His touch wasn’t clinical, detached like the doctor’s either. He roughly turned Shiro’s hand over. Prodded the shallow wounds with calloused fingertips. Tested joints, methodical one two three down each one, his own fingers cracking as he worked.

All of this done in utter silence. Broken only when he’d stopped the methodical testing and resumed wound-prodding. Lighter this time. Still soft enough to bruise.

“People expect things from you even if you’re a no one. By the way.”

Shiro tried to keep his wincing to a minimum as Keith poked a rather tender spot.

“Sorry, what?”

“People still expect things from you if you’re a no one,” Keith repeated. He was staring at Shiro’s hand, a heavy scowl on his face. “Avoiding doing stuff that makes it into datachives, for starters. Staying no one.”

Shiro felt his fingers twitch in Keith’s grip. His hand was at an uncomfortable angle but he was loathe to move. Doubted Keith would notice even if he tried.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “Everyone loves a good Cinderella story—”

“In sports and fiction, maybe,” Keith interrupted. “But nobody actually likes being the loser in one. No one likes being beaten by some no name.”

Shiro fell silent, a few details suddenly gaining further context. Calluses, bites, locker rooms, canned food, Kogane.

The last of his anger, a few of the harsher edges of his fear eroded away, dissolving soft and warm in his blood. Tinged his nerves, making them spark. Quietly urging action.

On a whim Shiro tapped his thumb against Keith’s hand to get his attention. An attempt at reassurance, something pithy but well-intentioned on the tip of his tongue.

Did not expect Keith to startle and practically throw his own hand back at him like it was a pinless grenade.

Shiro immediately flipped modes into damage control. 

“Keith, I’m sor—”

“Nothing seems broken or fractured. You should ice it if you can.” Keith bullied through his words like he hadn’t heard Shiro speak. But the tremor in his voice was worse.

Shiro swallowed the rest of his apology and nodded. He stared at his hand. Molten purples and reds in the light of the sim. He could hear Keith wrestling with his breathing. The sound of his heartbeat hitting against the cabin’s metal sides like a caged thing.

Slowly it calmed. Keith shuddered once and then stretched out his long legs. Let out a long breath. 

Shiro waited a few more seconds, repeating to himself what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. 

He tapped his foot against the center console. When Keith looked at him, wary and expectant, he said as earnestly as he knew how, “You’re worth losing to.”

Keith crossed his arms over his chest and sank lower in his seat. His gaze drifted up to the ceiling.

“I know my sim run wasn’t great but was it so bad that it warrants a pity pep talk.” He sank even lower. “Or is this about my lack of certain. Support. Systems.”

“It isn’t that. Either of those things,” Shiro said firmly. “You’re a good pilot, Keith. And will probably become an amazing one while you’re here. People are going to happily lose to you—if nothing else than because they’ll have gotten to entertain the idea that they can compete with you. And I’m not exactly a betting man but I’d wager—at least three vending machines full of junk that your name will end up in a datachive someday. Probably with pictures of your—I don’t know. Inaugural Andromeda run or something else amazing.”

The longer Shiro talked, the lower Keith slid in his chair until he was practically horizontal. His arm was flung across his eyes, feet shoved as far as they could go underneath the console. He fell quiet for a very long time, and Shiro was only too happy to let the silence fill the cabin up with its grains of sand. He wasn’t used to being so. Peppy. And optimistic. The temptation to add a snide comment was strong but he bludgeoned it back with his bruised knuckles. Not worth potentially hurting Keith just to make himself feel less awkward.

At long last Keith let out an unsteady sigh and pushed himself up. He scrubbed at his face and then turned to face Shiro again. His eyes were slightly puffy in the corners.

“What’s the point of telling me all this. I can’t—the way you see people is just so. Removed from reality. You may as well be talking King of the Rings at me. Even if I can fly circles around them it’ll just lead to resentment. That’s how humans operate.”

“I’m not trying to—it’s Lord of the Rings by the way, not that it fucking matters—I’m not trying to convince you of some... grand-scale human altruism,” Shiro said. He turned to face Keith as well, catching the other cadet’s gaze.

“You’re going to be that good,” he said. “There won’t be room for anything but acknowledgement.”

Keith looked exhausted in the patchy cabin light. The stars on the monitor were starting to flicker. The sim would shut down completely for cooling in a few minutes. 

With a little shudder, Keith shook his head and ran his fingers absently through his hair, his eyes staring off into empty space.

“…King of the Rings sounds so much better, though.”

Shiro frowned.

“Sorry?”

“It rhymes,” Keith explained. He dropped his hand in his lap. “Superior title.”

“…It sounds like a pay-per-view boxing match. And not a well-sponsored one.”

Keith let out a quiet snort that Shiro hoped was laughter and then said an absent, “Maybe.” He turned his hands over in his lap. Cracked his knuckles. “By the way, if you’re this nice to people you deem scary and volatile, I’d hate to see how cloying and saccharine you get around people you actually like.”

Shiro laughed and sank back into his seat.

“Luckily that number’s very few. Otherwise my blood cells would probably turn to blood honey and coagulate and I really don’t need that right now.”

Keith snorted again and made an exaggerated gagging noise.

“That’s horrifying.”

“Blood honey does imply blood bees, though,” Shiro pointed out. “Think about how cute they’d be. All red and tiny.”

“No.”

“Blood honeycomb—”

“Quit it.”

“Blood royal jelly—”

“Shiro!”

Shiro let out a startled yelp as he suddenly found himself pinned to his seat by a considerable portion of Keith’s weight. The other cadet had pushed himself out of his seat and leaned across the small aisle to punch him in the sternum. He’d opted to keep his fist resting on Shiro’s chest for balance as he glowered down at him. The effect was slightly ruined since he had to hunch over considerably in the low-ceiling cabin.

Keith scowled.

“Why are you being gross.”

“I’m being imaginative,” Shiro corrected. “And a touch immature.” He winced. “Why’d you hit me so hard?”

“Balance issues. Ceiling’s lower than I expected.”

Keith pushed himself away, but didn’t go far. He rested against the console, legs on either side of Shiro’s, arms crossed over his chest. He opened his mouth to say something, hesitated. Just long enough for the sim to let out a series of quiet beeps before shutting down altogether.

The cabin was instantly plunged into total darkness.

Keith gasped in surprise, and before Shiro could reassure him that the sim was just shutting down, Keith attempted to extricate himself from his awkward position, accomplishing not much other than kicking Shiro in the shin and crushing his nose with his hand as he lost his balance.

Shiro swore a blue streak and quickly groped around in the dark until he found Keith’s elbow to steady him. He gingerly patted his nose. No blood. Thankfully.

“You’re touching my elbow,” Keith said. He didn’t sound thrilled.

“You introduced my nose cartilage to my brain so I’m going to say you’re getting the better deal,” Shiro muttered. 

He heard Keith shift his weight and then mumble, “Sorry. Are you… uh. Are you. …Okay.”

“Yes, thank you for expending the three sentences it took to ask that one question,” Shiro said tersely. He took a deep breath to get his temper under control and then asked much more kindly, “Are you okay? Not going to tip over?”

“No. My eyes have adjusted.”

“…To what?” Shiro asked as he let go of Keith’s elbow. He heard Keith move around but the cabin was pitch black for him still.

“To the dim light. What else.”

“Fast,” Shiro commented. He squinted, trying to make anything out in the dark. Faint light of the door. It wasn’t hermetically sealed or anything, thankfully. 

Shiro carefully pushed himself out of his seat and headed over to the cabin door. Somehow Keith managed to stay out of his way. Shiro braced himself against the door lever and threw his weight against it. It let out a low squeal of protest. Stubborn old thing. All the new sims had been diverted to the “show-off” part of the Garrison. The area where officials were brought through to see what their investment in the experimental space program had gotten them.

Shiro tried again, grunting in pain as his shoulder caught on a jagged piece of the door.

“Keith, a little help?”

Shiro felt Keith settle in next to him. The other cadet made almost no noise at all. No stumbling, no shin banging. No awkward fumblings.

Shiro filed away that particular observation for later.

Keith let out a soft grunt. A puff of air tugged at the fine hairs on the back of Shiro’s arm.

“Why isn’t it whooshing open?” Keith asked, voice strained.

“The sim shifts everything to manual on low power. Push on three, okay?”

“Why not just push now?”

“Because it’s more dramatic to—fine. Push!”

Shiro shoved his shoulder against the door. He heard Keith straining next to him and after a few tense seconds the door creaked open enough for Shiro to wedge his arm into the crack and give it one last shove. The door protested but swung open, revealing a sim room that was almost as pitch black as the cabin. Shiro squirmed out of the cabin and stood in the middle of the darkened room. The lower power lights had been on, if memory served. And the window shades had been up.

Shiro checked his watch and felt… unsurprised was probably the closest. Resigned, maybe. Very tired. The cold air of the sim room made him realize his shirt was soaked through with sweat and was clinging to his skin.

Keith clambered out as well and walked over to stand next to him. His hair was damp. Plastered to his forehead. He swiped at it, made a confused expression as he glanced around the room.

“Did we blow the power or something? Why’s it so dark.”

Shiro wordlessly held up his band in front of Keith’s eyes. Keith hissed in surprise (at what Shiro had to assume was the sudden light) and then fell into a stunned silence.

“…How—…three seventeen in the morning. Seriously?”

“Unless my wrist decided to take up residence in a different time zone.”

“How many times did we run that program.”

“Twice. Seventy five minute runs each.” 

Shiro tapped his watch again but time didn’t magically fix itself. He walked over to the windows and pushed aside the UV screens. The stars were bright on the other side of the glass. Speckled all the way down to the distant barren horizon. Garrison exterior lights had been turned to sensor only for the evening. Made the sky easier to see. The astronomy students would be hard at work in the towers dotting the mountain ridges.

“This is getting fucking ridiculous,” Shiro muttered. “Maybe the sim run time is off.” Didn’t explain either of the earlier incidents, but it was something scientific to cling to. It was comforting.

“Are we going to be in trouble?” Keith asked. He’d moved to stand in front of the window bay as well. A few meters between him and Shiro.

“Probably. Missed dinner. More importantly missed bunk check. Doubtful they’ll believe we spent nine hours training in the sim. Brighton’s going to rub it in my face.”

Keith shuffled a bit closer to Shiro. His boots squeaked too loudly against the tiled floor. A decibel that shouldn’t exist at three in the morning.

“Sorry if—do we get, like. Demerits. Or something.”

“Most cadets do for missing checks and things like that,” Shiro said. He leaned against the glass to cut down on the glare and stared up at the stars.

“Most. Meaning you don’t,” Keith said.

“Not usually. The other night was an exception. A legacy like me can do no wrong, most of the time. Even when I actively try.” Shiro rested his forehead against the glass, suddenly feeling drained. No food or water for nine hours. Or fresh air. Made sense. He chuckled and turned his head to the side to glance at Keith, who was staring at him with mild concern in his dark eyes. “Spending nine hours in a sim unsupervised might test that theory for the first time in years, though. It’s kind of refreshing. Despite the terror and exhaustion.”

Keith raised a thick eyebrow and pushed aside the UV curtain next to Shiro. He pressed his face against the glass as well, his nose leaving a little streak behind. He absently wiped it away with his sleeve.

“You weren’t unsupervised,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I was there.”

A bubble of exhausted laughter forced its way past Shiro’s lips. He pressed an arm against the window to brace himself as he laughed. The noise echoed against the glass, making it tremble underneath his fingertips.

Keith’s boots squeaked closer.

“I was being serious,” he muttered.

“I know.” Shiro let out a slow breath and glanced at Keith again. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be funny.”

“…Oh. Uh. Okay.”

Shiro just hummed in reply and plopped his hand on the glass near Keith’s face. Did his best to make a thumbs up.

Keith stared at Shiro’s hand, lips pressed together in a thin, contemplative line.

Shiro waited a moment and then said politely, “It’s a thumbs up. Not a hieroglyphic.”

“Wh—I know that.”

“Okay. Could you acknowledge my gesture so I can move. Bit uncomfortable. What with my fresh idiot wounds and all.”

“…Thanks for the, uh. Distorted. Hand. Placement?”

Shiro let his hand drop and gave Keith a little smile before looking out the window again.

“Thanks for supervising me. Even though I’m—…I’ll let you supply the descriptor.”

Keith let out a breath that fogged up the window. Shiro watched it disappear. Keith’s face was barely visible in the glow of the emergency lights.

“…I’m tired of describing things,” Keith said finally. “Especially you and—this. Restlessness or paranoia or whatever is. It’s making me feel like I’m not actually… experiencing anything. Like I’m looking at everything through this.” 

His fingers tapped against the glass. That same rhythm as before. His gaze flicked to the side, studying Shiro’s reflection in the window. Shiro closed his eyes, the back of his neck heating up a bit under the intense stare.

“I don’t know why it’s more embarrassing to be stared at now that we’re not trapped in a little space nightmare pod together,” Shiro muttered.

“I’m not—oh.”

Keith shuffled away again, muttering an apology that Shiro tiredly waved away as he said, “It’s been a very confusing… hours. Days? If you’re game to play normal I am all for it.”

“…Sure.”

Shiro felt Keith lean against the glass again. Heard him sigh. He didn’t know how to read the sound.

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. Scratched its way down Shiro’s spine, fingernails on glass. The crawling feeling was back. He could feel Keith stealing glances at him, but he was determined to ignore them. Normalcy and logic, that was the new framework to cling to. Faults in sim programming, in clocks. Intense training that made time slip away faster than it should. No stars or emptiness, just flesh and blood, bruised and callused skin.

Shiro closed his eyes against the night sky and pretended he couldn’t hear Keith breathing or feel the pulse of Keith’s heart against the glass. The wild, unsettling thrum of energy in the back of his mind as he felt a phantom puff of air across his skin. A phantom handprint on his chest.

Shiro cracked open an eye and glanced over at Keith. The other cadet was staring out the window now. Eyes trained skyward. Lips slightly parted, relaxed. He looked distant. If he was thinking of handprints or fear or stars, he was doing a good job of keeping his thoughts hidden.

Annoyingly hidden.

Keith must have felt Shiro’s gaze on him. He turned his head and raised an eyebrow at Shiro in silent question.

“I’m hungry,” Shiro said by way of explanation. “I’ve got some snacks in my room if you want to stop by.”

Keith’s peaceful expression immediately twisted into one of embarrassment. Maybe a little irritation. “I don’t need you to feed me. I’ll steal something from the kitchen.”

Shiro pushed himself away from the glass.

“And how are you going to get in, Mr. ID-less?” 

Keith let out a quiet groan and swiped his fingers through his hair.

“Seriously. To get into the damn kitchen?”

“Not that you’d be able to take anything. They keep everything locked up tight.”

“And how do you know that.”

“Before I was a master at bribing cadets out of their snack money I used to try sneaking food from the kitchen. I was… I’ll be kind to myself and say stealth was not my forte and leave it at that.”

Keith stared at him, unimpressed and tired.

“It’s a kitchen. How lockdown can it be.”

Shiro felt his cheeks heat up.

“It wasn’t that—I may have, ah… felt the need to add a stealthy spy soundtrack to my escapade. And my compulsion to dramatically kick open every door I come across didn’t exactly help.”

“What.”

“I hit one of the mess officers with a door and the guilt plagues me.”

For a moment Keith didn’t react. He stared up at Shiro, thick brows furrowed. 

And then suddenly, he was laughing. Hunched over, arm wrapped around his ribs. Fringe falling to hide his expression. A deep, gut-busting laugh that filled the pitch-black three A.M.

Shiro rubbed his arm to distract himself from the feeling of triumph threatening to overwhelm his embarrassment. Keith was laughing. Possibly at him. Didn’t matter. Still felt like a win for normalcy. Karate-chopped into oblivion whatever presence had been lingering in the room with them, trying to claw its way in. Keith laughed, and things were wonderfully, thankfully simple again.

“I didn’t think it was that funny,” Shiro said after a few beats.

“Y-You’re right,” Keith wheezed. “It’s not.”

“…Oh.” Shiro couldn’t hide his disappointment. “Then what’s with the laugh riot.”

Keith shook his head and held up a finger. He took in a few sucking breaths before he managed to say, “H-How am I terrified by you. I don’t—i-it makes no… earthly sense.”

Shiro wrinkled his nose, not liking the reminder of abnormality. “…Maybe you were a chef in a previous life. And my tale of chef-slaughter struck a chord.”

“No, that’s not it.”

Keith let out a slow breath before standing upright. He dragged a hand down his face.

“I think I’m. I’m just tired. I’ve been tired since I got here. Not sleeping well, maybe.”

“…Maybe,” Shiro said quietly. He heard normalcy beg him not to ask if Keith had been dreaming, too. Hydrogen stars and ships. He could guess the answer and it made his skin grow cold. Chest constrict.

Shiro rubbed his arm, trying to breathe some life back into his limbs.

“Wait here,” he said, and then added a, “I’ll be right back,” when Keith threw him a startled look. He headed out of the sim room, grabbing his bag on the way. The vending machine was the only source of light in the hallway besides the emergency lighting. He held his ID up to the reader and proceeded to spend half of his credits on snacks. Thankfully someone had restocked the machine at some point.

Shiro shoved what he could in his bag and scooped up the rest in his arms. It took some skillful maneuvering to open the door without dropping anything, but he managed to make it back inside the sim room. Keith was exactly where he had been, standing next to the window. Even in the dim light Shiro could see that his arms were crossed. Defensive. Unsure.

“What’s that,” Keith asked. There was a note of relief in his voice that made Shiro feel like a monster for leaving. For two minutes, if that.

“Food,” Shiro said. He unceremoniously upended the bags and packages onto the floor and lightly toed a bag of Funyuns. He made a face. “Of sorts, anyway. My treat.”

He plunked down in front of the window, his back pressed up against a sim near the wall, and gestured for Keith to join him. After a moment the other cadet gingerly sat down, avoiding the piles of crisps and cookies and other corn syrup secretions. He tugged his knees up to his chest and stared around him at the ocean of snacks.

Shiro yanked up the UV shade so they could see outside properly and then handed Keith a bag of Doritos.

“Here. Cool ranch.” He grinned. “My flying style, apparently.”

“…Thanks,” Keith said slowly as he took the bag. He fiddled with it as he eyed all of the snacks. “…Which one’s mine.”

“Whatever you want. No way I’m eating all of this by myself,” Shiro said as he tore into a candy bar.

“No I meant—my. Flying style,” Keith said awkwardly.

“…Oh!” Shiro thought for a moment and then dug through the piles of snacks until he found a package of spicy Cheetos. He held it up for Keith to see. The other cadet gave him a look.

“…I feel like I’m at some palm reading psychic session. How do I interpret this.”

“You have a flagrant disregard for your own health and well-being. In the end you get the job done but not without a few scrapes and burns,” Shiro explained. He opened the bag and fished out a Cheeto. He held out towards Keith. “Here. Eat the metaphor.”

“I regret knowing you,” Keith muttered as he grabbed the chip. He shoved it into his mouth and chewed. A moment later he gave Shiro a look of resentment.

“This is what you think of me.”

“They’re good, right?” Shiro said encouragingly.

“They’re vile.” 

“That self-preservation instinct gets easier to suppress after a few bites, I promise.”

Keith shoved his hand into the bag to grab another handful. He crammed them into his mouth and fixed Shiro with a look of resignation. Shiro grinned and passed him the bag.

“Better, right.”

Keith wordlessly nodded and began methodically licking spicy dust off his fingers. He turned and stared out the window, shoving another handful in his mouth every few minutes. Shiro leaned back against the sim and stretched out his legs in front of him, enjoying the silence as they ate. After a few minutes Keith slowly uncurled, stretching out his legs as well. His foot came to rest a few centimeters away from Shiro’s. Shiro remained still, not sure if the closeness was intentional or not. Grew even more confused when Keith’s foot lightly bumped his. Like a stray cat testing the waters after it had been fed.

Shiro lightly bumped back. Was relieved when Keith didn’t react other than to clear his throat and quickly open a package of cookies, offering one to Shiro, who accepted with a quiet, “Thanks.”

Keith shrugged and bumped his foot against Shiro’s. Bolder this time.

“Can we do this again tomorrow.”

Shiro bumped Keith’s foot again. Was rewarded with an embarrassed glare.

“I don’t think I have enough creds left to buy this many gastrointestinal mistakes again.”

“No not—…” Keith made a frustrated noise and turned to stare at Shiro. “Can we fly together again. Tomorrow. Please.”

Shiro frowned.

“What about orientation?”

“Someone’ll read me the riot act at some point, probably. I don’t care. And you said it yourself, this is more important.”

“…I did say that, didn’t I.”

Shiro let out a little breath and tilted his head back, staring up at the sky through the crystal-clear glass. Well, crystal clear save for a few smudges they’d made.

He should say no. He shouldn’t have said yes in the first place, not with spots in special projects on the line. He’d forgotten, somewhere along the way, that Keith had been brought in as a ringer. Would most likely outstrip him and Matt and everyone else who had been working for years to earn a spot. He really shouldn’t. He’d skipped one day of training already and he was going to be a mess if this kept up—

Keith’s foot lightly bumped his again.

Shiro glanced at the other cadet. Keith’s lips were pressed together, his eyebrows knit with resolve. He lifted his chin and met Shiro’s eyes. He moved in closer, fingertips inches from Shiro’s leg as he braced himself.

“Shiro,” Keith said quietly.

That was all. That was enough.

Shiro had to look away, his ears and neck burning red. He’d never heard his name spoken with such intensity before. Not by cadets during sim runs. Not by instructors. Not by his own parents, dim though those memories were. His name had never been heavy, never carried gravity, but Keith brandished it like a weapon, and Shiro felt an inexplicable desire to surrender. 

With a sigh Shiro tore into another package of cookies, trying to breathe normalcy back into the air.

“We’re getting your ID fixed first,” he warned. “I don’t care how much you hate Ames.”

“Sure,” Keith said airily, a note of excitement to his voice. “And then sim training?”

“Apparently, yes.”

“With just us?”

Shiro fell quiet, alarmed at the violent reaction boiling under his skin at the thought of bringing in anyone else. It was upsetting on a level so visceral it made him nauseated. The thought of the other. Any other. And he realized with a start that he couldn’t remember the last conversation he’d had with someone who wasn’t Keith. Was it with Matt? Izaak? His roommate or Ames or Deodhar? It was almost impossible to differentiate among the possibilities. Matt was probably annoyed with him, would be furious if he found out he was helping Keith in the sim. His roommate was probably worried. Instructors, too—he was supposed to meet Keela for a quick checkup in a few hours. Doubtful he’d make it. The only reason they hadn’t come looking for him, most likely, was the weirdness of exams week. Probably thought he was blowing off steam in the gym and had lost track of time. Hopefully that’s what they were thinking. The weight of their concern—even just imagined—was already making him feel penned in.

Keith was watching him intently, eyes dark and focused. His foot was tapping that same rhythm against Shiro’s. Waiting for recognition. For acquiescence, for understanding.

Shiro could only nod. It was a relief to surrender, shut out the possibility of any other. 

Keith let out a little breath, a smile lighting up his face and washing away the harsh angles in his stare. He leaned back, arm brushing against Shiro’s. Shiro could feel him fighting not to jerk away, slowly winning the battle.

It was a long while before Keith settled down. His breathing lost its frenetic edge, evened out into the shallow flush of sleep.

Outside the mountain ridge begin to glow pink and orange. Drowning out the stars, the empty space between them. Shiro drank in the warmth and the comfort and simplicity of sunrise. Tried hard not to read too much into gentle press of a shoulder against his as he slipped into unconsciousness. 

-x-

He knew he was dreaming. There was no floor beneath him. No ceiling. Just a pane of glass in front of his eyes. Inky black. A tinny voice in his ear that made his bones rattle.

_“—dragged you into this. How can you not—”_

_“—never. I made my choice.”_

_“—to die! I can’t reach you, there’s nothing—”_

_“—not scared. Really, I’m not.”_

_“Liar. Don’t lie to me, not—”_

_“Never.”_

Breathing. Disbelieving, exhausted laughter.

_“…Now? Seriously?”_

_“When else. Kind of fits us, don’t you think.”_

_“Morbid bastard.”_

_“Watch it.”_

_“’Morbid bastard,’ he said with grudging affection.”_

Terror, sorrow and bitter joy. Furious anger that slowly, forcibly quieted into a silent cocoon. The droning whir of life support was growing fainter.

_“It’s colder than I remember.”_

_“First time for me. I think. Kind of hard to—”_

A horrible explosive sound rent through the speaker next to his ear. A silent, brilliant flash of purple white beyond the glass. A hundred ships, swallowed by the burning star.

Then it was done.

And it was empty once more.


End file.
